Handling it.

I have been officially "in residence" for two-and-a-half weeks, and I feel like the days have been well-spent. I've seen a bunch of local theatre, read 15+ plays, generated a lot of rough pages, finessed a piece I hadn't touched in almost a year and watched (mostly quietly) as the production of "Handled" at Creighton University takes shape.

I also took the occasion of having ready contact with college students to host a table read of my most-close-to-complete new full-length play, "Mrs. Whitman's Words for Women."

I cleaned off my dining room table for the occasion. (We have a dining room with no table at home. I know now that if we had a table, it would be home to at least two knitting projects, two journals, two books I'm reading, my planner and an iPad.) The play calls for four women and one man, ages 18-23, and we were able to get pretty damn close.

I had not heard this draft out loud, so I went into the evening nervous about very particular parts of the script. I also started having bad feelings about taking up people's time and keeping them too long and all kids of things, but I did my best to let that go, and we read:

It went well. It was good to hear the words out loud again--I feel like the last table read I did in Chicago was in the first three months of the year. The feedback was positive, the readers were moved and I saw the spots where the work needs to happen. Good, good night.