Today is Valentine's Day. It's a Hallmark Card kind of holiday, no doubt invented to boost sales of some sort or another. I'm just guessing. I didn't google it. Fine. It's the American way. Not being cynical, just musing.
Angie and I spent the evening, a really fun evening as it turns out, at our dear friends, Mark and Tammy, in their really exquisite Manhattan Beach house. Mark is a player with Fox Network and Tammy owns her own exclusive catering company headquartered out there.
We had a couple of friends in from Missouri (ostensibly to see my play, but really just to get away from the horrid Missouri weather for the weekend), Steve and Carolea.
So we all trotted over to Manhattan Beach following the play yesterday (typical matinee, by the way, played to a sea of blue hair).
I love spending time over at Tammy and Mark's place. For one thing, it's a really cool house; there's a beautiful and very private back patio complete with fire pit, hot tub and ping pong table. The conversation is always lively, with a great deal of healthy disagreement over a wide range of topics. And then, of course, there's the food. As I said, Tammy is a high end caterer and we always eat like Louis XIV over there. Or XV, or XVI or whoever it was that had the best food. Last night was no exception...filet mignon was the centerpiece of the evening.
Steve, coming in from Missouri, had never been there before, although his wife, Carolea (whom I've known for about 31 years) spent some time in LA early in her career and had visited the house often. Steve is now a very successful business man in southern Missouri, but back in the day he was the lead singer for a really great, semi-famous rock band called 'The Mistakess.' He is now the very picture of the former rock star complete with a deceptive 'I don't give a fuck' attitude. A funny and smart guy, the truth is he does give a fuck and he's incredibly informed.
These are good people. The kind of people I like to be around. I don't socialize much, I've made no secret of that in this blog over the past year or so, and when I do I like to be around people that challenge me, people that provoke and question me. I like to be around people that have opinions. Odd as it sounds, so many, many people simply don't. Well, not these folks...they do and I love it.
Steve and Carolea had seen my show, Adding Machine, the night before and like many others, didn't quite know what to make of it. I think it fair to say they liked it in a 'big picture' kind of way. Carolea is a true musician, years of training under her belt and a very discerning eye when it comes to this sort of thing. Last night when I called the music 'Sondheim squared' she said, enlightened finally, "Yes! Yes, that's it exactly!"
Steve, who is the kind of guy that doesn't suffer fools gladly, said as we dropped them off at their hotel last night, "You know, I've never seen you live, always on a DVD or something. You're unbelievably good at what you do." Coming from someone like Steve who rarely, if ever, speaks in superlatives, it meant a lot. Made my day, in fact.
Angie and I have been tossing around an idea as of late, a new company we're thinking of forming. Not a theatre company, but an actual business. So I sort of plopped it out there last night to get some reactions. In an instant the evening turned into a massive brainstorming session. They all thought it an amazing idea and were tremendously supportive. So much so, in fact, that Ange and I kind of made the final decision to go forth with it. Now, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, a business kind of guy. Angie is far ahead of me in that respect. So today, we start the actual research, the actual nuts and bolts implementation of this idea. When it is moored securely in reality, I'll write about it. But all in all, we're very encouraged.
So it's Valentine's Day. I won't belabour my thoughts on that. I will simply say this: Never in my wildest dreams, my most outlandish fantasies, my most fervent and halcyon imagination did I ever expect to find someone so perfect, so good, so beautiful and fascinating, so forever as Angie. She has single-handedly and seemingly effortlessly given me the life I've spent five decades searching for. She is my soul.
And a happy Valentine's Day to all of you, Gentle Readers.
See you tomorrow.
