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Greetings NYCPlaywrights

 

 

*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***

 

Between Acts is an immersive audio theater podcast experience. Each biweekly episode sets the stage for your imagination to freely venture through the works of newfound playwrights—from dramas to comedies and everything in-between.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-acts/id1533365134

 

*** PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS MASTER CLASSES ***

 

Our 2020 Master Class series offers sessions with some of the most dynamic artists working in the American theater. Each upcoming class will take place on the following Monday evenings at 7PM Eastern, and will be streamed live for attendees via YouTube. 

 

Admission is free — participants will receive details via email in advance. Note that these sessions usually run about 75 minutes in total. 

 

October 26: Raja Feather Kelly (choreographer of A Strange Loop and If Pretty Hurts…)

November 9: Jaclyn Backhaus (playwright of Men On Boats and Wives)

November 16: Heather Christian (author of Animal Wisdom and the musical Soundstage episode “Prime”)

https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/about/programs/perspectives

 

 

*** PRIMARY STAGES ***

 

LAST CHANCE THIS FALL: Comedy Writing with Kate Moira Ryan at Primary Stages ESPA! 

Learn how to craft a laugh with KATE MOIRA RYAN (Writer with Judy Gold, 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother) in Comedy Writing! This class is for any playwright in any stage of your career interested in the comedic form. By the end of this class, you will have a solid understanding of the principles of comedy and how to weave them into any script. 

Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available. 

https://primarystages.org/espa/writing/comedy-writing-for-the-stage

 

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

 

The goals of The Miranda Family Foundation Voces Latinx National Playwriting Competition are to discover, develop, promote and amplify Latinx plays and playwrights. Repertorio Español is now in its 53rd season and 2nd decade of championing new works through playwriting initiatives. To that end, this competition and our theatre will prepare the way for an American Theatre that is reflective and representative of the Pan Latinx Community. An endeavor that becomes increasingly more important.

 

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Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries is a groundbreaking, industry-changing undertaking that is discovering, developing, and producing a new canon of 38 plays that are inspired by and in conversation with Shakespeare’s work.  It’s an opportunity for playwrights of every background, perspective, and style to engage with Shakespeare and his stage practices. It’s our chance to bring living writers into the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre: the Blackfriars Playhouse.

 

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The Anderson Center’s Jerome Emerging Artist Residency Program offers month-long residency-fellowships at Tower View to a cohort of early-career artists from Minnesota or one of the five boroughs of New York City for concentrated, uninterrupted creative time to advance their personal artistic goals and projects.

 

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***

 

 

*** FLOTUS *** 

 

Forget “Six,” the musical that was scheduled to open on the evening Broadway shut down in March. A clutch of variously divorced, beheaded, dead — and now delayed — queens of England is nothing compared to the long parade of American first ladies who have graced the White House since before there was one.

Whether the presidents’ wives (and mistresses and daughters) had it much easier than Henry VIII’s consorts is a question raised — and raised and raised — by “45 Plays for America’s First Ladies,” a relentless sketch comedy flipbook from the Neo-Futurist Theater in Chicago. Speeding through the 50 women it counts as its title characters in 100 snarky and ultimately unsettling minutes, it scratches the phrase “graced the White House” to find the grim beneath it.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/theater/45-plays-for-americas-first-ladies-review.html

 

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Jackie O is a musical and dramatic happening that takes us back to the heady days of the 1960s and an imagined gathering of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her peers in Andy Warhol's New York Studio.

 

Reinterpret Jackie through the eyes of Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Grace, Maria Callas and others. Explore the essence of media celebrity and pop culture. Rediscover the decade noted for extreme idealism, crash-and-burn transition and the rise of post-modernism. All to a fabulous, pop-inspired score.

 

More...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080612114154/http://www.banffcentre.ca/theatre/history/opera/production_1997/

 

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Charles Nirdlinger's comedy, "The First Lady in the Land," was made known at the Gaiety Theatre last night with Elsie Ferguson as the star. Of course "the first lady" meant Dolly Madison, who was to become mistress of the White House and give her title to be transmitted to all other mistresses of the Presidential home. 

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/1911/12/05/archives/elsie-ferguson-in-historical-comedy-appears-at-gaiety-theatre-in.html

 

***

 

In ''Eleanor,'' now at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center here, Jean Stapleton is once again playing the First Lady of the 1930's and 40's, one of her many television roles, in Rhoda Lerman's stage adaptation of her own 1979 novel. The book was dedicated to Ms. Stapleton, ''who has made Eleanor Roosevelt come alive.'' The actress in turn credits Ms. Lerman's book as being ''truer to the great lady's heart than any other account.'' It has ''informed all of my dramatic readings of Mrs. Roosevelt,'' Ms. Stapleton writes in an endorsement for the new paperback edition from Blue Heaven Publishing.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/01/nyregion/theater-review-a-one-woman-show-but-what-a-woman.html

 

***

 

“I do believe you darkies are trying to kill me,” says Martha Washington to her house slaves in this fantastical-historical play, just opened in a sensationally cheeky production at the new Ally Theatre Company. Martha has reason to be concerned.

 

Philadelphia Playwright James Ijames, a 2017 Whiting Award recipient, made up the script’s surreal story: George Washington’s frail widow lies in her sick bed having a fever dream populated by an antic assortment of black people. They appear to be waiting on her but really they are waiting for her to die, because by the terms of her husband’s will, they are then to be freed. So they pass the time messing with her head, playing out a wild series of comic sketches, and thoroughly entertaining the rest of us.

 

More...

https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2017/04/23/review-spectacularly-lamentable-trial-miz-martha-washington-ally-theatre-company/

 

***

 

Julie Harris, pale, gaunt and gallant, received a stand ing ovation at the ANTA Theater last night. She was starring, indeed largely sup porting, a new play by James Prideaux called “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.” The play is slightly old‐fashioned —some will find it none the worse for that—its texture is decidedly episodic, even patchy, yet it has spotlit mo ments of valid melodrama.

 

Mr. Prideadx takes a rather different view of Mary Todd Lincoln than that so often taken by legend. He apparently reels that her name was blackened in Herndon's first memoirs of Lincoln and has remained blackened in the popular mind ever since. This could very well be true, historians are certainly far kinder to Mrs. Lincoln than is common myth that tends to dismiss her as a schizophrenic shrew.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/13/archives/stage-prideaux-last-of-mrs-lincoln.html

 

***

 

Hillary Clinton has long loved theater — back in the day, she wore out a “Camelot” cast album and got standing room tickets to the original production of “Hair.”

In the years since the 2016 presidential election, she has become Broadway’s best-known fan, showing up regularly to see big musicals (she liked “Ain’t Too Proud” so much she returned with her husband) and small plays (she raves about “What the Constitution Means to Me”). Between 2016 and the 2020 theater shutdown, she saw 39 shows in New York.

The theater world, of course, is now in crisis. Because of the pandemic, it remains unclear when Broadway and other professional stages can reopen.

 

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/theater/hillary-clinton-broadway.html

A short story: The Lighter Side of Metamorphosis

 When Jake Skala woke up that morning from easy dreams he never thought he would find himself changed into a wonderful bird. And because of that wonderful dream he lingered in bed longer than he should have and so, Jake Skala was late again. Dashing out of the front door of his comfortable home in suburban Edina he raced to his car which waited expectedly for him on the off white cement of the driveway. 

Jake stopped and took in the morning air and turned to gaze at the Minneapolis skyline not so far off in the distance and say the clear dark outline of the Essex building where he worked and where they were, angrily no doubt, waiting for him, again. He stopped to pause and think which was one of the primary reasons why Jake Skala was late so often. He was a man of thought and pauses. 

“You know” he said to himself “If I could fly, I’d be there already” 

Whatever it was that overtook him pushed him forward and then in an upwards direction into the air and then, with a rhythmic rocking motion that came naturally, he lifted himself higher and higher into the air. By leaning forward he glided across the sky, floating past the cars and buildings and landed, somewhat roughly, in front of the Essex Building. 

Someone filmed the whole thing, from beginning to end, with their phone camera and posted the unusual site on YouTube and within hours Jake Skala of Edina Minnesota was the center of the world’s attention. The international media flocked to his door and wanted to know how he could fly.

 “Are you an alien?” was the most popular question to which Jake replied 

“You mean” Jake replied “Like one of those illegals?”

“No,” said the reporter with a shake of his head “like the other kind.”

Jake nodded his head in understanding “Nope, I’m from right on earth.”

“Then how come you can fly?” came a question 

“I don’t know how I learned to fly,” Jack Skala replied. “I was in a hurry to get some place and I just sort of,” he stopped in mid-sentence and finding the correct word, he continued, “Well I suppose I willed myself to fly. I just thought it and saw it in my head and the next thing you know, by gosh, there I was, flying.”

“Can you explain a little better than that?” a reporter asked. 

Jake shook his head and nope, no he couldn’t, and then asked the reporters a question. “Can you explain to me how you will your body to walk?”

No, they couldn’t. “Well,” Jake said patiently, for he was a patient man, “I can’t explain how I will my body to fly. I just sort of thought it and there you go.”

Well sir, as you can well imagine, a lot of people wanted to fly. These people, just average folks, didn’t have any place special to fly to, they just wanted to fly, so they willed themselves to fly and they did fly. It turns out humans could always fly, just like they could always walk and move their arms and turn their necks. In the next month, after people got the hang of it, Hawaii had a lot more tourists than usual and so did the North Pole, Florida and beach towns in Southern California. 

By week’s end an emergency meeting was held at the White House to discuss the human flying issue or what was popularly known as “The Skala”, as in “let’s Skala down to Mexico for spring break”. Sitting in on the meeting at the White House that morning were leaders of industry and commerce, leading members of the scientific community, the President and the President’s top people. The first to speak was Drew Nally, the aged and powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives, a noted captain of industry. 

“Mister President” he said in a no nonsense way “this flying nonsense must be stopped until we can control it!” 

“Why? Everyone seems to be having a good time. What’s wrong with it?” the President replied with a smile.

 “Well a lot is wrong with it sir, a lot. Our hotel industry is in big trouble, sir, big trouble” he said furrowing his brow on the second use of “big trouble” to make sure the President understood that it was big trouble and not just a little trouble. 

 “You see sir, most of these folks, these, these…..’ he searched for the word that offered just the right amount of condescending disapproval to it “these flying people,” he said almost choking on the words, “they’re mostly common, everyday folk.” They just drop by for the day; at best most are only staying a night, maybe two. There are just too many other places in the world for them to visit, you know, now that it’s a free for all”.

“Same with the restaurant business,” said the man who represented restaurant businesses. “With no airline carry on restrictions, people are carrying their food with them.” He turned to the man who was sent by the hotel businesses and said with a look of great disdain, “Whole families carrying their meals in knapsacks!” He scanned the table and said “knapsacks!” and all gathered there pushed out their lower lips and shook their heads in great disapproval of families carrying food in knap sacks.

“Mister President, I demand, in the name of the American people that we stop the American people from partaking in this sordid flying business before entire industries collapse and disappear forever, perhaps.”

“Like what?” asked the President 

“The question surprised Nally mostly because he hadn’t expected a question, because a man in his position is so rarely questioned and because he had absolutely no answer to the question asked. In the past six decades he had simply barked his opinions at Presidents and the Presidents did whatever Mister Nally suggested they do. 

“Well,” Nally sputtered, “like…say for instance…umm…” He stared at the flag pole standing so rigidly in the corner of the room and then raised a solitary finger. “Think of those people who make stairs!”

“Stairs?” added the President.

Still flustered Nally, rallied with his best answer “Yes, stairs. Why if everyone is flying why would you need stairs?”

It was a stupid answer and it hung in the air for several very, very long seconds before someone else spoke. 

“May I add,” added the eminent physicist Doctor Han Snider, “that aside from the catastrophic toll that human flying will take on the stairway industry” he said condescendingly with an eye towards the Vice President, “we must ask the all-important question….are we still human if we can fly? Were we, in fact, ever human?”

The President turned his head slightly to the left, considered the question and then said, “That isn’t as stupid as the stairway issue but it is still epically dumb.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” added Charles Dunning of the Intelligence agencies. “I mean…what comes next? Will we be able to shoot lasers from our eyes?” He chuckled and flashed something that was akin to a tense smile, stood from his chair and strolled across the room as he spoke. “I jest, of course, but I say we add some money to the defense and intelligence budgets and get on this thing ASAP.” 

The man from the US Department of Commerce looked angry. “Folks are just landing in the country from anywhere and everywhere and we don’t know who’s here, who isn’t here and who’s here that doesn’t belong here….” His voice trailed off angrily, for he was an angry man. In complete defeat he lowered his head and stared deeply into the rich dark grains of the oak table and whispered “People are doing whatever they want. We’re powerless.” The general from the Air Force leaned forward instinctively, and with all in the room watching him, bit his lower lip and patted the man from the Immigration people on the back. 

“Mister President,” said the Air Force general without moving his sympathetic gaze from the man from the Immigration people, “our nation is in grave, grave, grave danger.” 

The generals from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines and the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA nodded their heads as one in complete agreement with Mister Dunning. Then, as one, the admirals and generals and secret directors turned to the President for an answer

“Forget it, boys,” the President said. “You’re not getting another penny.”

The President stood from his chair and those in the room stood respectfully and watched as he collected all of his Presidential pens and notebooks and prepared to leave the room. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I see no harm in any of this. People are happy. Let’s just leave it alone. I don’t see any real problems here, unless people start to swim under water like fish,” and with that, he strode, in a Presidential type of stride, out of the door.

Jake Skala was late again. He had taken his family to Lake Minnetonka. They flew there to escape all the media glare that his simple yet magnificent deed had created. He had been fishing at Gray’s Bay Damn on the vast lake east end and enjoyed himself so much that he’d forgotten the time and now he was late, twenty minutes late to take his wife and daughter to a Walleye Dinner at Lord Fletcher’s Restaurant. He would have flown over the lake but a thunder storm that carried the occasional flash of lightening had darkened the sky and it would take him a full half hour to drive around the lake to the cabin. 

He stopped to pause and think, for as I said before, Jake Skala was a man of thought, he considering his options, he stared at the clear blue lake water and said to himself, 

“You know, if I could swim, I’d be there already.” 

 

A short story: The rise and fall of a paper bag.

  The long day was over and Elysia was temporarily released from the confines of her  suffocatingly small cubicle at the New York Public Library were she embedded codes in books, day in and day out, her doctorate degree in literary criticism taken from his place on her moveable green felt wall and hidden in her desk. 

 Paroled to the claustrophobic cabin of her economy car, a tin box that sat motionless in a massive traffic jam at 179th Street just inside Queens, it was, she thought,  as if the entire city converged there and suddenly stopped without reason.

She could see the outline of her building on the other side of the bridge counting down the floors she spotted the small window to her efficiency apartment.  It was less than a mile away, but she guessed it would take her two and a half hours to cross over to the other side. 

The setting sun baked one side of her narrow sallow face, yet its imminent departure from the day’s stage did nothing to lower the ceaseless, suffocating humidity that gripped the city. 

She thought again, as she did every night, that maybe she should have taught English. What happened to that plan, she wondered?  It was too late to go back to that. Her life, much like her car, were stuck in neutral, gridlocked, going nowhere.  

Releasing her sweaty palms from the hot plastic steering wheel, she resigned herself to her motionless fate and slowly sat back and turned her face from the blinding sun and focused her soft blue eyes on the cement and concrete labyrinth of worn roads and colossal apartment buildings that surrounded her 

 She watched a tall man appear at the doorway of a convenience store whose window signs pronounced proudly, in bold red letters, that it sold Ouzo by the case. The tall man reached inside a small dull ivory colored plastic bag and pulled out a long brown bottle of beer. He opened it and took a long quenching swallow and then tossed the bottle cap and bag to the hot city streets. She watched the cap make a valiant effort to roll for Jersey but sadden when it was only able to make a few inches to the curb before it expired. But her hopes were renewed when a soft wind lifted the plastic bag up from where it had gracefully fallen, an inch from the gutter and then swept it gently in to the air. 

  She could sense that this was no ordinary bag. 

Lifting itself up a few hundred feet it swayed softly along a jet stream and then smoothly lowering its altitude it bounced playfully on an unseen soft breeze. 

This bag with wings of wax was perfect in the wind, perfect. It was Sinatra in the forties, it was Fitzgerald sober and writing, it was the Yankees of 63 seasons, it was the son of Zeus and Hera gliding elegantly towards his rightful home on Mount Olympus or over to the Jersey shore, which ever was closer. She needed this bag, she needed it to succeed. A broad smile came across her plain face as she watched its rise and then she heard these words float down from the skies above her.

 “Nous sommes libres le moment ou nous etre libres!”

“We are free the moment we wish to be free.” She whispered and a tear came to her eye. 

Well, it was probably from pollution but still, you know, it was a tear so it kind of worked out right.  The near-tear arose from the fact that not only had the bag quoted Voltaire, completely out of context, but still, you know, it quoted Voltaire! In French! It spoke French! …okay with a slight Bronx accent, but still....I mean, you know, it’s a bag. And, although, like most Americans, she preferred Locke over Voltaire...well, she did have a liking towards Rousseau but sometimes he struck her as morally irresponsible but then again she wondered if her parochial school education just made him seem that way...but, anyway, moved by the moment, she leaped from her car...she didn’t actually leap, but she rushed from the car only to have the seat belt part that goes over your shoulder get caught in her hair and nearly choke her to death. But after that she more or less leaped from the car and still on fire with the passion of freedom burning white hot in her surpassed soul she raised a fist to the sky and yelled at the very top of her voice to the bag,

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things,”

Stopping to catch her breath she watched as the bag flew higher and she climbed on to her car’s hood and continued, 

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark nor even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

Hearing the deep passion of her words and seeing the bag fly its course so gloriously into the blue, a homeless man on the corner adjusted his aluminum foil hat, snapped the heels of his sneakers and standing at full attention, he raised his hand to his forehead in salute as the bag circled in the wind above him. The homeless man stood erect...in a bunch of different ways for he was easily excited when the medication wore off... he watched this magnificent bag rise up once more, up to the heavens escaping the surly bonds of Earth and the lonely grey caverns of Manhattan. 

It chose to fly towards Jersey, although Elysia thought that personally she would have chosen Connecticut, but, she reasoned, perhaps the bag was thinking shorter commute, who knows? But southward it flew over the Hudson. But then she thought that if she could fly what would a shorter commute matter anyway? 

 As she pondered that thought and realized it was a pointless waste of time and she really has to stop doing that she turned attention back to the bag and saw now that the bag was sinking from the sky. Perhaps the sun was melting it or maybe the wet air of the nearby Atlantic had dampened it or maybe, exhilarated by the thrill of flight and unrestrained freedom, maybe it had fainted. She knew bags didn’t faint but she needed a reason. 

Downwards and downwards it spiraled descending from the clouds to its icy grave below...but then she thought, well, okay, the Hudson probably wasn’t icy in mid-August but like, still, it was a crappy way to die, considering what they pour into the Hudson and everything. Rolling her tiny hands into tiny fists that she rose to the sky, she rolled her head back to face the heavens, closed her eyes and cried a mournful shrill,

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aero planes circle moaning overhead.”

She lowered her eyes in defeat and then lifted her gaze to the river and watched the bag that was so much more than just a bag land in, on or maybe near, the river and disappear. 

“Give me a sign that you made it,” she cried and then hugged herself.

“Lady, “You’re blocking traffic over here already, what the hells the madda with you?”  a voice boomed and she was disappointed because she didn’t think the bag would sound that gruff but ti wasn’t the bag it was the voice of a cop in a police helicopter circling behind her. 

The road before her, now cleared of traffic across the bridge and all the way into New Jersey, was empty. Turning completely around she eyed a traffic jam behind her that further than her eyes could see. She looked to the man in the car directly behind her. His license plate claimed he was from Georgia, or at least his car was. He was staring at her. His lips were tightly closed and his eyes were wide as saucers and when she looked at him he very quickly diverted his eyes to the floor in a way that shouted, “Please don’t hurt me.” 

 It was now official.  She was a crazy lady. She lowered her head and returned to her car. She gave a last look to the bag and recalling its valiant flight she vowed that her life would change.

A simple story. A short story.

 

The smell of freshly brewed coffee relaxed the cop as he sat at the counter, removed his hat and turned his radio down. Taking a plastic covered menu from its holder, he glanced it over and put it back. He knew the menu by heart. He’d eaten every selection on it this past year and what an awful year it was. He looked into the mirror in front of him that ran the length of the counter. He felt himself going there, to that miserable place where his daughter cried, and wife no longer loved him. And realizing he was going there, he pulled himself away by pressing his fingers hard into the counters linoleum cover. 

He looked into the mirror again and recognized the man sitting one stool away from him on is right. Without turning to look at the man, he said, “Aren’t you one of the O’Donnells brothers?”

“I haven’t done anything, I’m just sitting here” the man answered without lifting his gaze from the counter. 

“I didn’t say you did anything wrong” the cop answered calmly “I just asked a question, that’s all, no point in getting all rambunctious on me” and as soon as the last part of that sentence spilled out, he was sorry he said it.

The waitress poured the cops coffee and set a place for his breakfast.

The man turned to face the cop and said, “I’m Mick O’Donnell. Is that okay?”

The cop shrugged and made a motion with his hands that asked O’Donnell to calm down “I was just ask’n” the cop said, “That’s all.”

They stared straight ahead at the coffee pots for several minutes, each feeling uncomfortable with the other’s presences.

“Where are your brothers? Use to see you guys all together all the time”  The cop asked, “There was two of them”

“Three” O’Donnell answered “Their dead.  They died”

The cop turned in surprise to look him directly in the face “Dead?”

“Yeah” O’Donnell said with a slow nod to his reflection in the mirror.

“How?”  The cop asked, genuinely surprised “What are you guys? In your forties, maybe?”

O’Donnell spoke without looking at the cop “Rory died a few years back, lung cancer. Cigarettes. Lonny died in prison doing time on an armed robbery charge. He was always sickly ”

“I remember that,” the cop said. “And the third one? You said there were three”

“Michael” O’Donnell answered. He tilted his head a bit to the cop “He was the youngest” and then looked back at the coffee pots “He was shot in California. Went out there to start over and bam! That’s that….some kind of dispute with his girlfriend’s family; we still don’t know what it was all about”

“I’m sorry. That’s hard luck.” The cop said, and he meant it. He watched O’Donnell count the change in his pocket and then order a cup of coffee and Danish. When the waitress came to take his order the cop said “get me bacon, two eggs over, toast and home fries” and then cocking a thumb at O’Donnell he added, “He’ll have the same, my check”

“You don’t have to do that” O’Donnell.

“I know” he answered, “I don’t have too, I want too”. He thought about what he had just said and remembered his pledge to tone down his edges and to strive to be a kinder, gentler person. He turned to O’Donnell and said “I guess I should’a asked you first”

“That’s all right,” O’Donnell said waving it off.

“Still” the cop replied “I would appreciate it if you would allow me to pick up breakfast”

“Sure,” O’Donnell said softly. He was hungry.  “Any reason?”

“Well” he answered, picking up his coffee and taking the empty stool next to  O’Donnell “I guess it’s my way of saying thank you, without the O’Donnells  breaking the law every other week, I’d be without a job”    

It was a well-intended but risky, quick intimacy, but O’Donnell pulled his head backwards and  smiled broadly.  

“So what are you doing now days?” the cop asked

“I’m a house painter,” O’Donnell said happily and reached into his worn shirt pocket, pulled out a white business card and handed it to him.    

“Kids?” the cop asked as he took the card.

“A daughter” he answered “You?  Married?”

“Separated” the cop answered “I got a temper issue, stress related and I also have issues relating to people’s situations. What’s that…? Um…em..empa”

“Empathy?” O’Donnell asked.

“Yeah!” the cop answered “There you go, that’s it. I’m work’n on it, you know”

O’Donnell leaned in close to the cop and said softly   “Hey, listen. No shame in a day’s effort for a good thing, right? We all got stuff we’re working on” 

Their breakfast arrived, and they fell into silence for a second, a nice, soft silence that caused them both to relax and lower their shoulders. Each of them wore a small, satisfied grin.

“You know,” the cop said “It feels good to say that out loud, the guys I’m seeing for my issues…. he halted abruptly “He’s a therapist guy, not a psychiatrist. I’m not nuts”   

O’Donnell shrugged, Valley speak for “Its okay”  and they both set about shoveling their breakfast off of it plate in mighty swings of their forks.

“But” the cop continued,  “He says I’m supposed to talk about it, about what’s going on, you know? But who gonna talk to about that? I’m little embarrassed to tell you, I don’t have anybody I can talk to about that, but it goes on inside of you, you know?

“I know, I know”

“But let me say this, that’s why women live longer” he put down his fork and pushed his plate aside  “Because women build what they call communities, like when their kids are little ones, toddlers, they have stay at home, Moms build communities, and walking clubs and all that. And that’s how they make new friends, that’s how they have a live outside of themselves. But men…”

“We don’t do that” O’Donnell continued for him “And that’s not good, you think too much, you get all inside of yourself, you get a heart attack and you die”

“And we should do that” the cop added “Somebody should organize that for guys, like a…um”  

“Like a Priest or something”

“Yeah like a priest or something”

The cops radio called out. He listened to the noises coming out of the contraption and sipped the last of his coffee.

“That you?” O’Donnell asked with a nod to the radio.

“Yep, that me. What would they do without me?” he smiled.

“God only knows,” O’Donnell said and smiled in return as the cop peeled off several bills and left the on the counter.

“Hey, listen,” O’Donnell said as he stood to his feet “Thank you for breakfast. You working the day shift I guess huh? Well look, why don’t we grab some dinner, here, tonight, about six, you can talk, you know, empathize and all that, how’s that sound to you?...its better than eating alone right?”

The cop stretched out his hand and they shook “It is. I’ll see you then”