Paul Rudnick

I know nothing about cars. I failed my driving test six times, for good reason, and so I’ve never gotten a license. But yesterday, John and I went to the grand, glorious Manhattan Auto Show, because John, who’s an excellent driver, is thinking about getting a new car. The show is still going on at the Javits Center on the far West Side, where the enormous glass exhibition spaces are filled with block-long LED screens, acres of white carpeting, interactive consoles and above all else, glistening new cars, trucks, mini-vans and motorcycles, many set atop slowly rotating white platforms, to be properly lusted for.

Since I know nothing about cars, none of this interested me. When John would ask me which car I preferred, I tended to say things like, “the red one.” When we looked at the eco-friendly hybrids, I kept imagining having to shove celery and bran into the gas tanks. John was very patient and I do enjoy being a passenger. But here’s what fascinated me about the car show: the car people.

The place was crowded with bedrock, car-adoring Americans, wearing their most comfortable, oversize clothes. If you want to know who buys their jeans at Costco, in the Kirkland house brand, go to the car show. There were many sets of fathers and sons, bonding happily over Toyotas and Mercedes and Mazdas; my favorite Dad and lad were a middle-aged guy in a tucked-in, washed-out Sears polo and khakis, inspecting a Lexus beside a teenage boy wearing full makeup, artfully swooshed hair, skinny black pants and multiple piercings. There were also many groups of female friends, with everyone recording their favorite cars on their phones, like baby pictures.

The most impressive people were the impossibly glamorous sales reps. There were far more female reps, I think because they’re both more alluring and because male customers might feel intimidated by other, more knowledgeable car dudes. The women were all incredibly welcoming and well-prepared with every possible bit of information about a Prius or a Subaru or a Hyundai Hatchback. They were also undeniable babes: the Ford ladies, for example, all wore matching, fitted cobalt blue sheaths, while the Volkswagen platoon were allotted black mesh cigarette pants and skimpy grey blazers. The Lincoln women were the most high-end luxury bombshells, in spike heels and plunging, skin-tight black catsuits, with freshly blown-out hair and centerfold-ready, too-much-is-just-a-beginning makeup and eyelashes. And I want to put this delicately, but I believe that this year’s Lincolns come equipped with rather impressively engineered airbags.

From chatting with some of these women I learned that they travel all over the country for their employers. In earlier years, trade shows would often hire local actresses as window-dressing, but these women were expert salespeople, who just happened to look like Japanese anime superheroes. I’ve heard that at the boat show, bikinis are involved.

I know why Johnny Depp was rightfully paid many millions of dollars to star in the new computers-gone-mad movie Transcendence: it’s because at one point Johnny is required to shave his head. When Johnny has to sacrifice his trademark floppy bangs, he seems more upset than when he’s diagnosed with a fatal case of radiation poisoning. For Johnny, his hipster hair, tortoiseshell eyeglass frames and bank teller vests are essential, because remember, we’re talking about a 50-year-old movie star who still wants to be called Johnny.

Transcendence follows the same route as all of those Frankenstein and Vincent Price movies, in which a gifted doctor or scientist crosses the line, and a horrified co-worker says something like, “There are some things which man was never meant to tamper with!” In this latest version, after Johnny’s death, his grieving widow manages to upload both his consciousness and his wardrobe into a mega-computer. This whole process is the result of Johnny’s TED-talk worthy tech brilliance. Whenever a star has to play a genius or even a pediatrician I always start to wonder: in real life, did Johnny even finish high school?

Once Johnny is permanently online, he starts to invent all sorts of revolutionary nano-ware, which can cure the sick, make flowers grow and create mind-controlled armies, using the itinerant poor folk of some godforsaken midwestern hellhole; Johnny’s plans are like a malevolent form of Obamacare. If I could crawl inside the internet, my thinking would be different. I’d do things like comparison browse for appliances, delete all mean comments about Anne Hathaway, and have thousands of unwanted pizzas delivered to Time-Warner executives.

As Johnny gets crazier, Rebecca Hall, as his devoted spouse, has to wander around his desert ultra-lab, wearing flats and classic tapered white shirts. She’s constantly surrounded by projected images of Johnny, as if she’s trapped in a fan’s website, or in some fiendish new Disneyworld pavilion devoted to all things Johnny. Rebecca eventually gets very distraught, but come on: wouldn’t an online husband be kind of ideal? It would be like being married to Google, or an even prissier version of Alex Trebek.

Johnny is great when he’s playing freaks like Willy Wonka or Sweeney Todd, but he’s had problems with more everyday characters, who have to do things like open doors and drive cars. In Transcendence Johnny seems smooth-skinned, pampered and lost, like a rich lady trying to locate her driver after a premiere. But at least Johnny’s underground lair is impressively spotless. Maybe Johnny’s character also created a digital cleaning lady, if you ask me.

Today I was walking behind three Manhattan women, all wearing a near-identical uniform. Each woman had on black leggings, coupled with a blazer or serious cardigan, long enough to cover what needed to be covered, with a scarf draped around their necks, to draw the eye away from problem areas. Each woman was wearing her sunglasses shoved onto the top of her head, and dangled an outsize designer handbag in the crook of her arm. Every item was either black, grey or burgundy. When these women first spotted each other, did they realize that they resembled a midtown version of the Lollipop Guild? Did they feel mortified or reassured?

When a young gay man wears his sunglasses perched on top of his head, is he deliberately trying to evoke Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill?

Are tissue-thin, second-skin yoga pants even appropriate for doing yoga?

Today I saw a man wearing a diamond tennis bracelet, the sort of thing a philandering husband buys his long-suffering wife as an apology. Was I supposed to think that this man was either extremely gender-confident, or an absent-minded thief?

How many seperate tote bags and purses, when heaped over one woman’s back and arms, are too many? At what point should I worry that this woman was just evicted from her home?

When I see a person in business attire and a helmet biking to work, why do I always worry about the smell of sweat once they get there?

When I see a child wearing an expensive store-bought Disney princess costume, and it’s not Halloween, is it permissible to inform that child, “A real princess wouldn’t be caught dead in rayon taffeta”?

I was thinking about posting a parade of chocolate bunnies, but I decided that this blog has already had its share of holiday chocolate. So I’m going with what I’ve always considered a very sexy photo: it’s Tony Perkins and Tab Hunter, at the height of their youthful Hollywood stardom. They’re on an arranged date with two pretty girls, but their interests obviously lie elsewhere. If you’d like to see a larger version of this image, it’s worth Googling::

As both the musical “Chicago” and the current Oscar Pistorius trial prove, a great trial makes for the most riveting theater. The Pistorius trial has everything: a beautiful blonde victim, a crusading female judge, a rabid Prosecuting Attorney nicknamed The Pitbull, an especially bloody and vivid crime, and of course, a charismatic defendant. Oscar Pistorius is handsome and disabled, impressively heroic and excessively arrogant, and unlike many other, more wary defendants, he’s been willing to take the stand, where he wept, collapsed and yet found the strength to continue. Because his trial is taking place in South Africa, he’s also required to address the judge as “M’lady.”

A friend and I compared the Pistorius trial to that of the Menendez brothers, where two cute young guys, in 1989, were were found guilty of murdering their parents, for the money. I remember when the brothers testified, concocting a tale of parental abuse; they were like especially bad actors on a soap opera or in a silent movie, using stilted hand gestures to express despair. Even though both brothers are serving life sentences, they’ve both gotten married while in prison. The brothers have been denied conjugal visits, but Lyle married a former model, who then divorced him for cheating on her, because he wrote letters to another woman.

Erik married a woman named Tammi in the prison waiting room, where their wedding cake was a Twinkie. Tammi told the press that “It was a wonderful ceremony until I had to leave.” She’s said that her love for Erik is “something I’ve dreamed about for a long time.”

Pistorius already has many ardent female fans, as does the Boston Marathon bomber. Why would a woman want to be married to a guy on Death Row? Here’s why:

She’d always know where he was at night.

He’d have lots of time to write her love letters.

She wouldn’t have to get all dressed up for their dates.

She wouldn’t have to share the remote, the covers or the popcorn.

A handsome jailhouse husband is in many ways, an ideal fantasy object. It’s like marrying a romance novel, with just a hint of the safest sort of danger. But I wonder: when you marry a guy serving a life sentence, do you expect gifts?

Last night John and I went to the opening of Lincoln Center’s loving and sumptuous production of Act One, which James Lapine has adapted and directed from Moss Hart’s 1957 autobiography. The book is a touchstone for theater geeks everywhere. Each generation offers its own backstage tales: such works include 42nd Street, The Royal Family, Stage Door, All About Eve, A Chorus Line, the TV shows Fame and Glee, and such books as Frank Rich’s wonderful memoir Ghostlight, and Tim Federle’s delightful YA novels, Better Nate Than Ever and its sequel Five, Six Seven, Nate! – Tim’s books center on a kid’s desperate yearning to appear in a stage musical version of E.T.

Almost every theater-themed work follows an outsider looking for his or her big break, for admittance into the magical and sacred realm of, most often, Broadway. I’m a sucker for these stories. In Act One, the young Moss Hart dreams of escaping his family’s squalid Bronx tenement, and he writes a play and gets to collaborate with George S. Kaufman, a legendary playwright and director. Hart’s play, Once In a Lifetime, needs to be rewritten during its tumultuous out-of-town try-out, and even though I knew that everything was going to work out just fine, and that the play would become a hit, I was still terribly anxious. Anyone who’s ever been involved with a new play knows the stomachache-inducing terrors of the rehearsal and preview process.

Here are some things that I’ve either experienced or heard about:

On one new musical, the producers decided to cut their insanely expensive set entirely and perform the show on a bare stage. The set was dismantled and tossed into the alley beside the theater. The show was still a bomb.

When a show isn’t working and no one knows how to fix it, the producers will often obsess over some insane minor detail, like the leading lady’s wig.

I wrote a play called Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach. It was first performed as part of an annual one-act festival at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. During previews the theater’s Artistic Director called the play’s director, Chris Ashley, and me into his office. He was furious: the play contained frontal male nudity! This was outrageous! We reminded him that the script had always mentioned nudity – hadn’t he read it? He tried to cancel the show but finally we reached a compromise: there would be a large sign in the lobby, reading “WARNING – MR. CHARLES CONTAINS NUDITY, SMOKING AND OBSCENE LANGUAGE.” Who wouldn’t want to see that play?

During previews of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, during a brief dance sequence, one of our actresses actually did break her leg. I was never sure how this related to the theatrical “Break a leg!” superstition.

When a show is in trouble there’s always a moment when someone will ask, “Do we need the second act?”

I recently had a reading of a play I’m working on, with a wonderful cast. As a playwright, I need to hear a play read many times, through many wildly different drafts. With a novel or an essay, I constantly reread and rewrite, and I value the opinions of my editors. But with a play, especially a comedy, I have no idea if the script is working until I hear it out loud.

Readings are essential and torturous. There’s usually a small audience, and of course I’m desperate for that audience’s laughter and approval. If a line or a scene continues to play well, over more than one reading, I tend to keep it. Everything else is up for grabs. Sometimes I’ll have fixed one character, which then makes me realize which other characters need work. I try to also get some overall sense of the play, to see if the story sags in places or is unclear. Beyond this sort of repair work, I try to determine whether the play works at all, and whether it’s worth pursuing.

I’ve had readings of plays where I knew immediately, after the first five minutes, that the script simply didn’t work and couldn’t be fixed, even with endless rewriting. These situations were both upsetting and an enormous relief.

Jeffrey went through at least a year of readings; the first cast included BD Wong and David Hyde Pierce. Many of these readings included the beyond-brilliant Harriet Harris. Harriet was the only actress in the play, taking on all the female roles. I was desperate to have Harriet continue with the play, so I kept adding more and more characters for her to play, to entice her. Nathan Lane was also in several of these readings and while he didn’t end up doing the play onstage, he’s in the movie version.

I’m always astounded by the generosity of actors. They’re paid little or nothing to participate in readings, and their contribution is invaluable. I also treasure my work with directors, especially Chris Ashley, who’s directed so many of my plays. After a reading, Chris and I will sit down and dissect everything. Then we will almost always keep walking, as we try out every possible new idea. Plays aren’t just written – they’re walked.

I’ve been noticing those decals which the drivers of mini-vans have been adding to their windows, of stick figures which indicate family members: there’s usually a Mom stick figure, a Dad,a batch of children and maybe some pets. The first time I saw a set of these decals, I assumed that these were the people and animals which the driver had eliminated during a series of hit-and-runs.

I also look for those bumper stickers which announce, “I’m The Proud Parent Of An Honor Roll Student” or “I’m The Proud Parent Of A Northwestern Grad.” Shouldn’t the parents of somewhat less accomplished kids also be allowed to over-share?

“I’m The Proud Parent Of A Drug Mule!”

“My Child Can Read This Bumper Sticker!”

“My Son? Acquitted!”

“A State School Is A Great School!”

“My Boy Went On A Job Interview!”

“My Daughter Is Dating A Married Man Who Says He Loves Her!”

“Honk If You’re Still In Grad School!”

“My Adopted Child Stole This Car!”

“My Twins Got A Perfect Score On Their SATs! Combined!”

“Unplanned? All Of ‘Em!”

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of Jewish slaves. I picture someone asking the Pharaoh, “Excuse me, but you want me to do what? Build a pyramid? With my back? Good luck with that.” Then if the Pharoah insisted, the Jewish person would say, “Fine, I’ll try. There, I tried to move that large piece of stone, but it wouldn’t budge. Let’s think about a beach house.”

While it perpetuates Jewish stereotypes, I’ve always been partial to gelt, those foil-wrapped chocolate coins which arrive in little gold mesh bags. It’s like money only better.

In a traditional seder, there’s always a place setting and a glass of wine prepared for the prophet Elijah. To this day I have never understood who Elijah was, and Wikipedia only made me more confused. So I’ve decided that Elijah was Moses’ boyfriend, who was cute but always late.

Maybe, just to perk up this year’s seder, we need some new plagues:

Ungrateful children.

Those last five pounds.

Gluten.

Seasonal allergies.

People who hold the door for their friends on the subway, making everyone else wait.

Jewish men who use three names, as in Adam Max Weiner or Joshua Jason Feinblatt. Why not just cut to the chase and call yourself Bruce Princeton Harvard Law or David UPenn Goldman Sachs.

I’ve just read about an actual new disorder which is trending beyond ADD and ADHD and all of the other popular acronyms. It’s called SCT which stands for Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, and it’s characterized by “lethargy, daydreaming and slow mental processing.” It might also be called “Sunday afternoon.”

While I don’t want to minimize the seriousness of such conditions, I keep imagining even more:

CEAEYPS – This stands for Compulsive Eyerolling At Everything Your Parents Say, and it can persist well into adulthood. The condition is dependant upon a child having deeply embarrassing parents, by which I mean, parents.

FCS – Fake Cough Syndrome occurs primarily on days when a child will be taking any sort of test. The resulting Fake Cough is truly heartbreaking because, as your child will insist, he or she is dying. The child will often agree to attend school “if that’s what you want”, while continuing to Fake Cough to the point of Fake Choking and even manifesting a Fake Fever. On days when the child is suspecting a pop quiz involving Advanced Algebra, Fake Malaria and Fake Ebola can result.

IHE – More and more children are exhibiting rampant symptoms of I Hate Everything. IHE can be diagnosed by asking the child any question, including “What would you like for dinner?”, “Would you like to go see a movie?” and “How was your day?” Some children can be fleetingly cured of IHE through the use of trick questions, such as “Would you be willing to smile for $500, and I’m not kidding?” and “Would you be happier if your Dad and I rented you your own apartment and let you drop out of third grade?”

DYF – Dragging Your Feet is most often caused by a child’s waking up in the morning. Co-symptoms include Severe Slouching and Murmuring Obscenities. If these symptoms persist, a parent is allowed to murmur, “Well fuck you too, and I hope you enjoy air-conditioning repair school.”

ITB – So many first world children suffer from a chronic Inability To Bathe. These children can be diagnosed from several blocks away, by the mixed aromas of sweat, bad breath, wet sneakers and Axe body spray. The only known treatment for ITB is to drug the child with an entire bottle of Ambien, and while the child is comatose he or she can be hosed down by a SWAT team in Hazmat suits.

A friend of mine was recently told, by a minority activist, that he should begin every sentence he speaks, for the rest of his life, by saying, “As the recipient of unearned white male privilege…”

Of course the activist was correct, in claiming that white males are automatically awarded cultural advantages. But because my friend was gay, I thought that he should receive at least a few oppressed minority bonus points as well.

Whenever anyone says anything even mildly critical to or about me, I am always happy to call them homophobic and anti-semitic. For example, if my editor wants to change a comma in something I’ve written, I always reply, “Oh, you just want to ruin that sentence because I’m gay, right? How do you live with yourself?”

I’ve decided that from now on, I’m going to begin every sentence with, “As the recipient of unearned white male privilege, somewhat diluted by Judiasm, homosexuality and the fact that I have a large nose…”

Wait. Maybe I should concentrate on the nose card. After all, my nose is genetic. I can’t wear certain eyeglass frames because they make my face look like a railroad crossing signal. I’ve probably lost jobs to people with tiny, upturned, master-race little button noses. And why is “nosy” considered such an undesireable trait?

It’s never easy to play discrimination poker. Because I know that sooner or later, someone will raise the ante by saying, “Oh, yeah? Well just try being a woman with a big nose…”

Wendy Wasserstein once told me about her favorite backhanded compliment. A woman came up to her on the street and said, “I saw your play. It was light but I enjoyed it.”

Here are some other backhands, which I’ve either received or heard about:

“I liked your whatever the hell that was.”

“I didn’t hate-hate it.”

“I thought it got better in the second act.”

“My husband wanted to leave, but I made him stay.”

“It’s like a nice sorbet before whatever better thing you do next.”

“I was on the fence, but my mother loved it.”

“Maybe I need to see it again.”

“I wasn’t laughing, but I had a nice time.”

“I don’t care what anyone says, I loved it!”

Here’s the thing you must never do: never approach someone involved in a show and say, “I saw your play”, and stop there. You should either lie and say, “I saw your play and it was great” or be honest and say, “I saw your play and I didn’t get it.” Just announcing that you saw or read something sounds like you want either an attendance medal or a refund.