DamnedFool.com. . .

Coming up to the 18th weekly post on our personal blog. It’s free.  Visit and subscribe.  It includes my voice, Elizabeth’s, and the voice of our Court Fool, who claims to be more highly unqualified than any pundits currently punding.  Hope you’ll visit.

Lear progressing. . .

We’re in the fourth of fifteen months’ work on a King Lear for two actors (us) and thirty puppets.  Three acts (haltingly) memorized, all but five puppet heads cast and their bodies now being mass-produced.

And I finished the eyes and painting on the ten tiny finger-puppet heads that perch on my fingers as Lear’s riotous knights — hair still to be added.  But odd problems arise.  Thanks to American enterprise, the matte varnish I used turned out to be high-gloss.  Shakespeare did not intend his text for high-gloss actors.

Ko. . .

As mentioned last month, we’re invited to perform at the Ko Festival, an annual festival of progressive theatre in Amherst, MA.  On July 25-27, we’ll be presenting an amalgam of our Co-Creation memoir and Gifts, in keeping with the Festival theme, Work/Job/Career/Calling.

And we hope you can spread the word to students or friends about our workshop July 28-August 2.  “Shape-Shifting Your Story” will be an intensive process (6 hrs. a day for 6 days) of evolving stories, shaping them, and finding the best “language” to bring them across.  More info at the KoFest website.

Gifts. . .

Two great performances of our house-concert show Gifts in Sebastopol last month, and three coming up in Southern California May 9-11 — Los Angeles, San Diego, and Van Nuys.  Email us if you’d like an invitation.

Miscellany. . .

Our personal garden is proliferating, thanks mostly to the hands of Elizabeth — this year tomatoes, garlic, beets, strawberries, raspberries, currants, beans, squash, artichokes, asparagus, zucchini, and various herbs.  That’s in addition to our plum and apple trees, and our inedible feral cats.

We’re now in the second draft of our novel Hammers, based on our 1996 play premiered in Baltimore and Philadelphia.  You can read the playscript here if you’d like.  It’s a radical reconception, of course, and very compelling to take a deeper journey into it, but it keeps the basic spine.

Our other novels — Realists, Galahad’s Fool, Long Shadow — have continued to garner rejects (actually one offer, which we’re pondering).  But persistence is like garlic: there’s never too much.

And our son Eli, who’s been an actor, a graphic artist, and a perpetual inspiration with The Independent Eye for the past 40 years, is getting married on May 24th.  His bride Meg Chilton is a performer and one of our tribe.  We’ll be joined by her parents from Illinois, our daughter Johanna and her guy Francesco from Italy.  We’re insanely pleased.