The Weekend is Over. Los Angeles is expecting torrential rains and flash flooding. Not cool for the "burned areas", but a definite lift from the perputual sunshine of California life. Let's just hope things don't get too crazy: rain here can be as destructive as fire. As destructive as thin personalities who thrive on materialsim and Hollywood fantasies.

I picked up an interesting woman yesterday... at Amoeba Music. Lol. JUANA MOLINA. She didn't sing a word of English. Only Spanish. And man oh man. Yeh, you guessed it. I'm in love again. Juana is delicate and full and quietly poetic with enough soul to send you drifting into neverland while driving through Little Armenia on Sunset Blvd near Interstate 10.

Today should be full. I'm going to do some major cutting on my new play Crossing America. I have a reading in NYC next month and I want the read to be smooth and clean and successful. After working on my play Farewell Miss Cotton I've learned my language-dense plays don't fall easily from every actor's lips. And I'd rather spend my rehearsal discovering plot and story inconsistencies than interpreting language.

I also plan to write a few scenes from my newest play. It's a period piece set in rural Kentucky circa 1845. About a free family of color with Underground Railroad ties and a strange woman who appears on their steps in search of refuge. I'm excited by this play. I get to play around in history [i love history]. And I get to explore the lives and impulses of free people of color. [My maternal grandmother's family were considered "free people" and were free BEFORE Kentucky became a state in 1792. They worked as barbers and shoemakers and tobacco farmers. Many of them were poor and the laws governing their lives were abominable, but their testament to early America is one I find fascinating. And the stress and contradiction of living as free people in a slave state makes for some damn important drama.

Well... I'm off and running. Juana Molina is calling me from the living room. And you know me: I'm a sucker for a woman with a voice that stirs the soul.

Until next time,

Keith