15 March
So yesterday I had a rehearsal for my terrible new show.
On Monday I had a rehearsal that I didn't tell you about where I was supposed to have three out of four actors, but one of them didn't show up and I only had two, so I was reading in both of the girls, and it was a mess.
Yesterday I had a really good rehearsal, though. I'm beginning to have hope for this show. I think the actors are going to pull it out of their collective asses, and I'll have saved another crappy script.
So, after rehearsal I was walking down 45th St., heading for the movie theatres on Broadway, and I passed the Plymouth and the Martin Beck and the Golden and the Booth...and all of a sudden I thought "Wait a minute! Why don't I go see a Broadway play!"
I hadn't seen one, you see, since the folks were in town in August 1996, and though I saw a bunch of plays when I was in London last year, I never see anything in the city in which I actually live!
So I went to the TKTS booth and I really wanted to see The Last Night of Ballyhoo, but it was only 25% off rather than 50% so I thought maybe The Diary of Anne Frank or 1776 or the new Mamet, but when I got to the window the Ballyhoo tickets were really only about $8 more than Anne Frank, so I decided to see the show that I really wanted to see.
The Last Night of Ballyhoo is a play by Alfred Uhry, who wrote Driving Miss Daisy, and you know how a straight play with no stars can stay open on Broadway for longer than a year? It's a really terrific show, that's how!
It's about rich Southern Jews in Atlanta at Christmas time in 1939, at the time of the Gone With the Wind premiere. They are completely non-religious, celebrate Christmas, and, in the words of one of the characters, "Wish they could just kiss their elbows and become Episcopalians"!
Into their midst comes a handsome young man, a Brooklyn Jew, who finds that in Atlanta there are two kinds of Jews, the German Jews and "the other kind"--Russian, Polish, Eastern European Jews, and he is "the other kind".
It really is a very funny and wonderful play, but it's also very moving at times. Ballyhoo is a big dance at a country club, and the young man takes one of the young girls there and he finds out that his kind is restricted from that club. At the end, they make up and she says "There's just a big hole inside me where the Judaism should be" and he says to close her eyes and wish for something that she wants more than anything, and she does, and there's this little dream sequence and the whole family is sitting around the dinner table, the girl does the blessing over the candles, and it's shabbas, and I'm weeping like a bucket at that point.
Wonderful, wonderful show.
Here's what I wrote in my five year diary on Friday the 13th:
"What was the unluckiest thing that happened to me this Friday the 13th? Well, in a remarkable co-incidence, just like the Friday the 13th last month and every single Friday the 13th for the past eight years, I did not have sex!
Wow, it really is bad luck!"
I was watching Saturday Night Live last night, and I gotta tell you, I don't think I've ever in my life seen anything sillier than The Backstreet Boys.
And keep in mind that I was around for the Bay City Rollers!
One year ago today:
So, I hope you're enjoying my book!
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Last Updated Thurs 7 May 13:44:09 1998