Last Night's Dream

I had such an unusual dream last night, little sweetheart. You and I were at some awards ceremony - it might have for the theatre or maybe it was a film festival. Anyway, we both were nominated and we both won! I don't know why I dreamt that part - maybe because tonight is the Academy Awards (although I rarely watch and only mostly did with you and even then we usually forgot they were even on until an hour after it had begun and were like "Oh, yeah - the Oscars..." and would turn on the TV in your room, halfway through. 

Anyway, the more interesting part of the dream was after. We were staying in some little hotel and we had to check out by noon. We both got up and I thought you were in the bathroom but just then someone knocked on the door. It was room service and they were bringing up your breakfast order. I asked if they could bring something up for me too and the lady was a little flustered but said yes, she'd have to hurry because the kitchen was about to close. 

After she left I was getting dressed and I looked in the mirror and noticed I had a new line on my forehead. I started to examine and touch it and I noticed that I was bleeding. Like above my hairline and then all down my face. I tried wiping the blood away but it kept bleeding. I knocked on the bathroom door but you weren't in there, so I went in, put a washcloth under cold water in the sink and pressed it to my forehead until the bleeding stopped. I cleaned up and everything looked okay. 

Just then you came back into the room smiling and pushing an upright piano on wheels into the room. "I found it upstairs!", you said, beaming mischievously. It was like an electric piano, a Rhodes or something - short scale, 49 keys or so and a full on piece of work with a wooden base - not just a keyboard on a stand.  But also light enough to move around on casters somehow. "Let's take it home!"  you said. 

We were really happy with your find and our night. Then I woke up. 

Ha! What do you think it all means? 

With love... your Michael

Tom Stoppard

Little sweetheart, the playwright Tom Stoppard has passed away. I wrote this (below) this moring and posted it on some of our socials:

Tom Stoppard has passed away.

Summer was in the first regional production of his play, "Rock n Roll" - which may have been her favorite job ever - a co-production of San Francisco's ACT and Boston's Huntington Theatre.

 

While she was waiting in the wings to go on just before curtain one night at The Geary, Stoppard ambled out the shadows and told her he loved her work on his play. She was stunned and delighted and managed to compose herself before her indescribably memorable entrance, which was akin to Cleopatra arriving on her royal barge.

 

I already liked and admired him but this made me love the fuckin' guy.

 

God bless and rest you, Mr S. I think there's a red headed siren up there waiting to greet you. Maybe you have another role for her...

 

 

 

 

Halloween

When I think of holidays, little sweetheart, I invariably, of course, think of you. 

Spending Christmas together was one of my favorite memories of all time. Our first Valentines Day together was pretty special, even though we weren’t technically “together” until a few weeks later - you sat next me at dinner when Edna took everyone out after Tir na nOg to a restaurant that had no power and was lit only by candlelight. In Irish tradition, everyone around the table was asked to tell a story or sing a song and I sang Roberta Flack’s “Let Them Talk” with such emotion, the proceedings fell entirely silent. But you squeezed my hand and told me that you wanted me to sing it again later, to and just for you. 

Our second Valentines Day was that amazing trip your dad took everyone on to Lake Tahoe - our "trip to the snow" we came to call it. And we sure had a crazy and eventful 4th of July about a year later when your dad took us all up to stay on the Oregon Coast! Your brother Ryan shot off some fireworks from the porch that went off target and started a small brush fire at the edge of the property. 

Our gatherings never lacked for drama, little sweetheart, and as you told me that first week we were together as we raced toward some last minute appointment you were a little late and a lot panicked about, “it’s always like this.” 

All this to say, of course I think of you on every holiday but if someone were to ask me what your favorite was, although I’d be inclined to say Christmas, I think Halloween might give it a run for its money. You loved Halloween and it really revived my own affection for the day. I wrote about this in our book, little sweetheart, so it’s sort of on my mind. 

I had gone down to LA for a double-workshop reading of my plays 7PGS and Real Real Gone, you were getting ready for the transfer of the production of Rock n Roll from ACT in San Francisco to The Huntington Theatre in Boston. You flew out just a day or two before I - me back to New York and you to Boston, were I would join you the following week in advance of your birthday. I was staying with my friends from the theatre company in LA and since they lived in Van Nuys, the Burbank airport was closer, so I arrived and departed from there instead of LAX. It was a much smaller and friendlier airport and it was nice way to end the trip, which had been successful and fun. 

I’d forgotten until I got there that it was Halloween and when I got to my gate, all the Jet Blue crew and staff were in costumes. It was a really festive and cheerful atmosphere and it made me think of you instantly - how much you would love it. As I thought about that, it dawned on me that I hadn’t celebrated Halloween in years, had even come to find it a little annoying, people out on the street shouting, spilling out of bars in the wee hours. I was a curmudgeon before my time. When had I lost the joy, the childhood delight of Halloween? 

Like some many things, little sweetheart, you brought the holiday back, you gave it to me again. As ever, you brought the light back into my life. 

With all my love, always… Your Michael

A Memory...

Little sweetheart, I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook. I check in once a day because we’ve sometimes gotten messages for the band’s page there, so I try to be watchful for that. There is a feature there called “Memories” and it reminds you of something you may have posted or that happened on that particular day some years ago - like its anniversary, whatever the post or event might have marked.

I mention all this because, one day, the feature reminded me that that last play I wrote for you, My Before & After, had its performances with Seattle’s ACT eight years ago.

Your mom came up to Seattle to see the play and stay for the talkback - the after-show Q&A between the playwright (me), the Literary Manager and the audience. ACT had flown me out to be part of a program with one other playwright in a co-production with The Icicle Creek Theatre Festival. Each year they select two new plays and cast a company to play roles in both, then put everyone up for two weeks at an Arts Retreat in the mountains in central Washington state, work on each play, presenting them at the end over consecutive nights, before coming back to Seattle for the performance at ACT.

It was really kind of lovely. I had my own little cabin - with air conditioning and wifi! - and there would be two rehearsal periods each day, a morning one and an afternoon one, which we’d alternate each day, one play or the other. The rest of the time I was working on rewrites in my little cabin or going for long walks in the woods. But I did have one entire day off and walked into the nearest town, about 3 miles away.

And that’s what I’m remembering most today, little sweetheart. How I ached and longed for you and how good the long walk felt. How I wandered around in the little village full of sweet little shops that I’d so like to have taken you to, have had you with me, seeing it all together, and that somehow, I think you really were at my side.

All kinds of little coincidences kept happening. I’d hear a song in one of the shops, a song that I’d heard you play on your little MacBook Air when we were together in your room. I stopped by a gift shop and was browsing there and found a necklace with your name on it. Silver chain and “Summer” in silver, too, at its center. There were just two of them in stock and I bought them both so I could give one to your mom.

Finally, I was really hungry and wanted to find something simple for lunch - I was really craving just a nice tuna salad sandwich - but there was some kind of majorly German vibe to the entire town and all the places were that kind of beer and sausage cuisine. Like Octoberfest all year round. I finally settled on a place that had a kind of sea theme, unusual I thought for a small village nestled into the mountains.

Again, it brought you to mind so much, little sweetheart, for your love of tales of pirates and sea lore and I felt as if you had led me there. I sat down and looked at the menu and lo and behold, there was exactly what I’d been craving - lovely fresh tuna salad, fresh greens and some hand-cut fries. It was mid-afternoon but nice and cool and unhurried inside. Very homey with dark paneled walls and decorated with nets and other sailing paraphernalia. I kind of felt like having a beer, something locally brewed, an IPA, perhaps, and they had one that looked good. You order a mug or what they called, charmingly a “schooner”, so I got the latter and it arrived in a tall, rounded glass.

I’d set out that late morning so very sad and lonely, little sweetheart. I’d met my lead actor for breakfast before I left and over coffee he told me he thought I was the saddest person he’d ever known in his life. How I longed and ached for you!

But I think you sensed that, little sweetheart, and came alighting near me all day to help buoy my spirits and keep me going. You fortified me. I remember thinking that very thing at the time. Memories, indeed.

How I love you! Forever!
 

Some thoughts

I don’t think much about the theatre, anymore, little sweetheart. But when I do you always come quickly to mind.

I was watching an interview last night that Stephen Colbert did with the great Robert Duvall. He asked him something about Brando and it made me think of you and want to tell you about it, too. Duvall, of course, famously worked with Brando in “The Godfather”. They were a generation apart and I think Colbert’s question was an acknowledgment of that, sensing Brando’s importance to the generation of actors who followed him. Duvall spoke about himself as a young actor, an acting student, really, in New York, along with his friends Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, who was also his roommate.

Duvall said of Brando, “He was our godfather. Me and Hackman and Dustin used to hang out and if we talked about him once during the day, we talked about him 25 times. Gene met him, by accident, for the first time, on the street and he almost cried.”

I don’t have that kind of feeling about the theatre any more, little sweetheart, but I remember feeling it many years ago, when it was so important to us both. I remember how serious it was to you and I am still so very proud of you.

Your mom used to say that you were the most talented person she ever knew and I know that feeling myself. As I’m writing our story every day, of late, I’ve been telling the tale of your performance in “The Blue Room”, which remains simply the most breathtaking thing I ever saw on a stage anywhere in the world over the entire course of my life.

I knew you’d understand exactly what Duvall meant and I thought of you even as he said it, wishing you we’re sitting here with me, watching it together, as you used to say - “watching a story together with my partner at the end of the day”.

I was, I am still so proud to have been called yours, little sweetheart. And I know you are here. Closer than I can imagine.
 

With all my love forever.
 

Finding The Way

Did I ever tell you, little sweetheart, that when I was still doing theatre there were a handful of experiences that had been most meaningful to me? As a playwright I think the London productions of District of Columbia, Seven Pages Unsigned and Detail  - at RADA, The Finborough and The Gielgud - were all especially fulfilling. And as an actor (aside from TV and film work, just theater now I’m mentioning), I think playing the lead in John Byrne’s Slab Boys Trilogy in its US premiere in DC and my very first job (at 18!) playing Jesus in Godspell in summer stock were the most important. 

Even if theaters and especially acting wasn’t something I wanted to do to the end of my days, all of these experiences helped me become an artist by giving me a vessel that I could pour truthful expression into. I think a life in the arts, if truthfully pursued (not nakedly ambitious), leads one to to a purer and purer distillation of one’s artistic expression, little sweetheart. Without rejecting the past, we can see how it helped us continue to refine and evolve and increasingly make art that is truly one’s own deepest expression. 

Everything I do is for you, little sweetheart. That’s what guides me. That’s why I say you are my conscience. So writing and composing and recording, releasing albums and publishing works has a purity of mission. Do you know? I know you do. 

A year or two ago, it struck me how much Godspell had meant to me, coming so early in my life, and yesterday, on Easter Monday, little sweetheart, I watched the film adaptation (1973). Much of the cast is from the original off-Broadway production at The Cherry Lane, with a few notable members from the very famous Toronto production. 

One of the actors, also from New York but not in the original production is the late Lynne Thigpen. She’s absolutely wonderful (they all are) and I can’t help thinking about her because I got to meet her once, little sweetheart, and she was incredibly kind to me. 

My friend, the late Curt Dempster, who founded the Ensemble Studio Theatre had asked me to speak on behalf of the company at a luncheon for the American Theater Wing - kind of New York’s main theatre institution, they give charitable grants to artists and are mostly known for being behind the Tony Awards. I wrote and gave a speech very much about creativity and the importance of being allowed to fail. It was something I believed EST was committed to - giving artists a home where they could attempt things and grow without commercial pressure. EST was part of the non-commercial side of New York theater. Off-Broadway was originally a response to the commerciality of Broadway itself. 

Needless to say, The Theatre Wing wasn’t all non-commercial. So, the speech was somewhat coolly received. Except by Lynne who had introduced me before and shook my hand after looking me in the eye intently and empathetically. It was the year District of Columbia was first produced in New York, that’s why Curt asked me to speak and that production was also rather coolly received until year’s end when TimeOut famously called it "overlooked" and first Boston’s Huntington and then London’s RADA staged productions. 

Tragically, Lynne died just three years later. I never got to see her again to thank her. 

All this must seem very rambling, little sweetheart, but I wanted to tell you. It’s all on my mind tonight, at the end of Holy Week, and thinking so very much of you. With all my love.    

Remembering Boston

I’ve been thinking about our time in Boston back in 2008 - 12 years ago this month - little sweetheart. Indeed, whenever I go to Boston now, I always think of our time there together. 

You were doing Tom Stoppard’s play Rock n Roll in San Francisco at ACT and the production came to Boston’s Huntington Theatre for a six week run. I remember how excited you were when you got the job and asking me if I “would be (your) boyfriend in Boston”. Of course! And everywhere else, too! 

You were wonderful in the play - I saw it several times in SF and soon after you opened in Boston I came up and stayed with you in the sweet little apartment - graduate student housing for Boston University - where they’d put you up. It snowed while we were there. And we walked around Boston on your days off. I’d go running around the Charles River when you left for rehearsal and cook dinner for you before or after the show. We visited the JFK library and went to film society benefit in Cambridge and met Willem Dafoe. And I was there for your birthday, too. I made you dinner and a cake and we had a lovely evening that night after the show. 

I have such memories of our time there together, my little sweetheart. I’m thinking about it tonight and holding you so very close in my heart. How grateful I am for you! 

With all my love forever.

Theatre Dream

I had kind of a funny dream last night, little sweetheart, but was the more blessed for it because you were with me!

There were several of us all together in a group at some kind of theatre performance. It had a very fringe-y feel to it material-wise but also seemed to be in a Broadway house - like an old theatre with lots of seats, kind of cramped but grand. The show was some kind of one-woman show and a little weird, not exactly realism. The performer was even a bit confrontational and I can't remember if she directed her ire at us exactly but we were a bit unsettled and tried to slip away.

We had to go down some crazy side door stairwell, like an old emergency exit or something and we got separated at first. I was looking around for you as I headed down the stairs trying to make an escape into the street when you came out from around a corner. You'd been to "merch" table or something because you had on a tee shirt and had a bag of a bunch of other things. Crazy, right?

I'm not sure what all this means aside from let's-get-the-hell-out of-here-as-fast-as-we-can-but-first-you're-going-to-get-your-money's-worth. Most important, I think, of course, is that you and I are together. May it be forever so!

With all my love.

An Anniversary of sorts...

Little sweetheart, as I'm working on our book, I have several notebooks going all at the same time. I'll switch from one to another as detail memories and events from different periods, working ahead in long hand as I periodically transfer long passages to type, editing and rewriting as I go.

Often little notes scrawled on index cards or postcards will fall out of one of the notebooks - some scrap of info or an idea I had wanted to get down in a hurry and save so it would inspire a passage when I got back to it later.

Yesterday, I found one of these. A pink post it that says "First Reh Jan 29th". That was to remind me of something I've already written about but that I set aside for today because today is January 29th. The note is to remind me that rehearsals for Tir na nOg began on this day in 2008.

You and I had first met, little sweetheart, about two months earlier, at the first reading of the play and then when I came back to San Francisco for a workshop of my own play, Seven Pages Unsigned, you were there in the audience. I was so surprised and delighted to see you!

Now, on this day, eleven years ago, we sat next to each other (something that I believe you yourself arranged by re-arranging the name tags around the table) and began the journey that would seal our souls together as one forever.

It's a mix of snow and rain, wintry and gray and cold outside today, little sweetheart. And as I type this and try to work myself up to attempting a run along the Hudson before the temps truly drop into something Arctic, I try to quiet myself and listen for your eternal and celestial presence.

Please be as near to me, at my very elbow, as you were eleven years ago this morning. I need you more than ever. And always. With all my love...

Forgetting Any Other Home But You

Little sweetheart, I was doing my home care yesterday - the physical therapy exercises I have been given to do here on days between sessions, to rehabilitate my shoulder post-surgery - and in the middle of them I thought of something and quickly wrote down a note to remind myself: “talking about and reciting ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Summer”.

Acting and the theatre seem so far away from me now, little sweetheart, so unimportant in light of the light that you are, that guides and blesses my life. But I remember so clearly talking with you about the play and reading it to one another over the phone in the first days when I was here in New York and you in San Francisco and longing for you so (as I do now).

How impatient we both were to be in one another’s arms again and how the phone had to do for the moment, however inadequate. I’d sit for hours either in the kitchen floor with the old landline or laying on the plaid couch in the front room with my bottom of the line Nokia (the free phone they’d give you for signing up) balanced on my ear talking to you for hours every night, usually three hours at the least.

In one of those early epics calls between you being here and my being there or both of us being somewhere else together, we began speaking lines of the play’s dialogue to each other from memory. I’d played Romeo in school and you’d done a proper production of it at a company in Oregon shortly after you’d graduated from Oxford.

The lines that came to mind last night “letting me forget any other home than this” (“home” meaning you) flooded forward and I remembered the ache and wonder of speaking them to you and hearing you reply as we poured them out to one another until you reached a passage and said that we needed to stop there because the next lines were something you could only say when I was within your reach and you gazing intently into my eyes, your voice an impassioned whisper of truth and love.

How I long for you my little sweetheart! How blessed I am to have ever been found by you! Please don’t go too far away. Please let me know that you are near and hear me. And please take me to you soon and forever, the very moment that heaven will allow. With all my love.

A Backwards Glance... forward!

I’m always so grateful to be visited by you in dreams, little sweetheart. I took too long the other day after waking to write down what I remembered. Darn it all! But I do have some memory of one last night.

It’s a bit blurry and short on details but what I do remember is that I was with you in someone’s car. They were driving and you were in the passenger seat with my right behind you in the back one. They had a lot of things to ask you and since they were giving us both a ride you were very conscientious to answer them but you did keep stealing glances back at me to let me know you were with me.

It reminded me of that time we were at a play together with Chris and Sheri and you came at the last minute but could only get a seat not with the three of us but several rows behind. All through the play I kept turning around with my back to the stage and my eyes reaching out to you with such longing! And you returned my desperate gaze with the kindest look in your own eyes as if to say, “I know, I know but just watch the play right now and we’ll be together as soon as it’s over, in no time at all, just the blink of an eye.” 

May that be so, my little sweetheart. May I be with you soon, again and forever, in just the blink of an eye. How very much I long for you, my True Love. My Angel.
 

Days Remembered

I’ve been so occupied these last weeks, little sweetheart, with the new album (weighing in at 23 tracks, it’s quite a handful of work) that I haven’t been able to keep as diligent as I’d like in banging out our first memoir but when I resume, which I hope to do by the end of the month, I’ll be nearly at the point of recounting out first trip to London together. And it’s actually the 10th anniversary of those very days, so so much of it is flooding back in the memory.

You’d just been here in NYC for a week and we knew we’d have England together in the months ahead because you needed to attend a friend’s wedding and I was going for several weeks to work on one of my plays with Wilson. I was staying in Kentish Town with Kris and Joy and missing you terribly. You’d drive up to the house in Davis just to be able to get on a landline and call me, eight hours behind, from California, to talk each day. When we weren’t on the phone, you were sending me epic emails, every single one of them treasured and saved. I’m looking over them even now, my angel.

When you finally arrived, I saw you coming down the stairs to the basement flat. You’d cut your hair! Just the front, cut it into bangs or a “fringe” as you liked to say. I’d asked Joy if it was okay for you to stay with us and she of course said yes. She loved you right away too. You and Kris were sort of an odd pairing - the two of you are so different! - but it didn’t matter. You were here, we were together.

You knew London, you’d lived there after finishing your degree at Oxford, but I still liked taking you to all my favorite places. We wandered The Heath and took the Tube down to The Embankment. Walked across the bridge together. Lingered on The South Bank. Saw Shakespeare at The Globe. Had a 99 from a stand near The Thames. Got tickets for The National Theatre and later Donmar Warehouse. Bought groceries at Tesco and made a delicious crumble once we got home. Got locked out of the bedroom one night when no one was home to help us and you picked the lock expertly with a hairpin. Cuddled and made plans and belatedly discovered a Cure song as it blared out of the boombox on Fortess Road “Friday, I’m in Love”, which became our anthem.

One night on the walk back to The Northern Line, looking out at the city spread before us, doing everything I’d longed to share with someone special, forever lonely but with you finally squeezing my hand healing every wound, every slight, I began to weep. “Don’t cry, don’t be sad yet or miss me - I’m right here!”, you said, knowing my heart, my way instantly and better than I myself.

These days are still so fresh in my mind, my little sweetheart. And I thank God for you and know that you are near, nearer than I can imagine. And that we will be together again and forever. Indeed, we already are. I just need to pass - when it is my time, not yet, you’ve already turned me back to wait - to know it. With all my love. 

Theatre Dreams

I had a dream last night little sweetheart. I was doing a play somewhere. Somewhere familiar from my past, as if I’d been there before. A little bit like DC, I think. The important thing is tho, that it was a play of Tom Stoppard’s and he was there. I think we might’ve been rehearsing and there was a break. I was alone with him in a room, kind of more like a hall. It was quiet and dark as if we’d left the theatre itself and were keeping our voices down and wandering alone with our thoughts when we found ourselves there together. And… I reminded him about you. I spoke your name. I told him how much you loved doing “Rock n Roll”. We hugged and I cried. “She loved you”, I said. And I told him how much I loved and missed you. It was kind of wonderful. It reminded me of your story of him backstage in Boston. Like he was on the other side of a fence or something, came back to talk to you. I love it when you’re in my dreams in any way at all. I brings me near you.

For the Better. Forever.

Little sweetheart, we're working on the live Of Love and Loss and at its center is something we call the "Choral Text Passage". It's largely based on my memorial speech for you but delivered by both Jason & I (and later, Kim) in turn and unison. There's a part of it - where I was talking about your acting - that I've wanted to rewrite, so this morning I had a go at this. It's below. I'm not sure how I'm going to break it up but this is the new section. Thinking of you, always... 

...This isn’t the main thing, so I don’t want to linger, but I have to say this: she was the truest artist I’ve ever known. Breathtakingly gifted. When we met, she was playing - inhabiting - the central role in "Tir na nOg" - a play about a young girl in the West of Ireland who grows to adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. She burned that stage to cinders every night. For six weeks. With three broken toes. She’d careened barefoot into some stair unit backstage during a quick change in the middle of the Final Dress and half her left foot swelled up and went purple. Her doctor told her she’d have to quit the run. Not a chance. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Neither did the audience. Not unless they happened by the stage door after and saw her striding away in her short air fracture boot.

When she joined this band, everything changed. For the better. Forever. I loved writing for her and she was the best musician I’ve ever known. Her vocals, like every part of her, were connected directly to her soul. And she had total telepathy. I’d play something on guitar and she’d meet me there the moment I arrived.

One more thing about her acting. A year after we first met and became inseparable, she got a job, down the coast in Carmel, doing “The Blue Room”, David Hare’s reworking of “La Ronde” where two actors, one male, one female, play all ten parts. Good actors, great ones, are supposed to be adept at one of two things - transformative character work, disappearing into a role; or the deepest kind of emotional connection, shocking us with their naked honesty. Summer could do both. Simultaneously. She did that night. In the round. A foot from the audience where you can’t hide anything or fake it. I sat there between Linda - her mom - and Coy - her friend - and I think they literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I couldn’t move after. She was that good. She is like the Supermoon - once in a generation...

Only You

Sweetheart, I was just thinking now of one night early when we we'd just started seeing each other but no one really knew yet. We were supposed to meet up but I was with friends without a car of my own and you were an hour away and we were supposed to go to some stupid play downtown in San Francisco that was maybe sold out so there might not even be tickets and we talked on the phone and you didn't think you could come. I was stuck there without you, sitting in some gastropub waiting to go see the show and I was so sad and miserable and then all of a sudden I saw you outside walking down the street toward the bar.  I shouted out "she's here!" and I literally leapt to my feet from the chair. I could feel my heart flying out of my chest! And I ran to you. Crying. I don't know how much of a secret it was after that. Or during the play when we couldn't get seats together so I kept looking back several rows to lock eyes with you, and that look on your face that said "I know, sweetheart, but we can't do anything right now". I never felt so much for anyone in my whole life, little sweetheart, and I never will again. You are the reason and the treasure of my life. Love you forever .

Gifts

Little sweetheart, I'm looking at one of your first cards to me. It's in a frame over my desk. It came with a gorgeous coffee table art book and you sent it to me on my birthday, just months after we first met, just after I'd come back to New York, just before your first visit here.

I remember that we talked increasingly and almost every day on the phone in those first few weeks after the play had closed in San Francisco and I had returned to NYC. My birthday was just less than a month after that. And soon after, you called to tell me that you were thinking of coming to visit. You wondered if you should just come for a weekend or a whole week. I told you that you should definitely come for the whole week because if you didn't, afterwards, we'd be sad.

You did come, of course, and it was magic. We really were quite new to each other still. They say that new couples are tested when they first travel together. This was far more intimate than that. The two of us bumping about here together in my little apartment for a week. But it was perfect and we were perfectly compatible and comfortable with each other immediately. It was extraordinary and it confirmed every feeling we had for each other. Later, after you returned to San Francisco - and not before we immediately made another plan of when to see each other next (in London at the end of the month) - you emailed to say you were "sorry to have left the place in such a tip" (a mess) and that I shouldn't think that you "hadn't seen (me) walking around behind and cleaning up after (you)." I wrote back to tell you the truth - I wasn't concerned about any mess or cleaning up, I was bewitched and simply couldn't stop following you around from room to room, so in love and overjoyed to have you here.

In the card that I'm looking at, this card you sent me with the gift for my birthday just a few weeks before you arrived and stayed here with me for the first time, you write so lovingly and charmingly, telling me about finding the book at the great little store in The Mission - Needles & Pens - where I'd taken you (and would again many times) and that you also wanted to include some gingersnaps from the bakery in your neighborhood (where we also would go together many times) but that you were worried they'd be "smashed to skitter with the heavy book and all...".

It's a beautiful note, little sweetheart, and noteworthy for being so early in our time together, that - like your calling to say you've impulsively decided to come visit but are making sure that's alright -  it still has the slightest hint of “if-that’s-okay” politeness about the fringes of our mutual head-over-heels falling in love. You say in the note that you’re hoping I don’t already have this book but that if I do, then I “better tell you & don’t be all nice and not mention it… OK?”.

Little sweetheart, no one has ever been as blessed as I to have been found and loved by you. As I sit here this morning wanting so much to write something down for you and so very mindful that yesterday I was not at my best, regretting it and praying that I may be better, do better, be worthy of the great gift that is you, I look at this treasure from our first days together and the words begin to come, the thoughts begin to appear, the love in my heart begins to swell.

I know I must do better and that I can. I vow that I will. I vow to quiet myself and take today one breath at a time with gratitude for you. And a prayer that I may be worthy, that you will let me call to you and hear and help and guide me. I will do better, my little sweetheart. I promise. Please, please be with me. With all my love forever…

Sharing Memories

Little sweetheart, I just saw a "memory" on my Facebook page from a few years ago. It was a "status update" that read like this:

"Bemused to discover that, unlike Tony Bennett, I left not only my heart but my belt, my Oyster card and my English mobile phone in San Francisco..."

Do you remember that, little sweetheart? I'd had to come back to NYC for jury duty, then a play with Wilson. You were down in Carmel finishing your run of "The Blue Room". It was the first I'd been apart from you since January that year. Then, a few days after I posted this and your show closed, you flew out to see the closing night of my own show and from then on we were back and forth the two coasts to be with each other, with the odd trips to London, Seattle, Ireland, et al. I'm further reminded of this, my darling, because I'm called for jury duty again a week from tomorrow, so this brings up some memories. Oh, little sweetheart - what a beautiful life we had. Love you forever!

My Miracle Girl

My sweetheart, I was longing so for you today and in a quiet moment waiting for the play to begin, I found myself alone. The other actors had gone downstairs and were at their places call. I had another five minutes or so and was sitting in an arm chair in the green room. The door to the girl's dressing room was open, no one was in there. They'd left a few minutes before. From where I sat, I could see their make up table and the mirror over it and in the reflection, the garment rack where all their costumes hung. I sat there in the chair feeling very lonely for you, my love. And I began, as I often do, to talk quietly to you, my heart so full and longing to be near you. I asked aloud for you to please "always be with me". And as I sat there getting rather teary, I saw one of the dresses on the garment rack slowly begin to sway. And then another. And then a third item, a blouse. No one was in the room. No one had been in the room for several minutes. But those three pieces of wardrobe had slowly begun to sway out of time, independent of each other, at opposing ends of the rack. I spoke aloud to you, lonely and longing, and it very much seemed that you answered me, my little sweetheart. You answered me just as you did by coming into my life seven years ago and filling my heart and soul and very existence with light and grace and love. My Miracle Girl, I used to call you, remember? How, even when you were only slightly shifting your weight as we lay entwined on my sofa or tangled up limb around limb in our bed, I would say "don't go too far away". You let me know again today that you are with me, my little sweetheart. You let me know I just need to have faith and act in love and trust in you. Yes, my sweetheart. Yes, my dear dear Summer. Yes, baby. Always. Yes.

Boston...

I'm in Boston this week, little sweetheart, and thinking of the time I spent here with you. It's even colder than when we were here, huge snowdrifts piled everywhere. Every time I take the "T" across the Charles I think of how after breakfast with you in your sweet little room where the theatre was putting you up, that I'd get into my running gear and gamely go for a run in the frigid air, circling the river by running along one side to the farthest bridge then back again on the opposite side to the nearest and finally home, nearly frost-over, to you. I thought of you Monday when I arrived and later at the theatre for Opening Night. I remembered how wonderful it was to see you on the stage and how nice to be backstage with you, even taking a nap in your dressing room together. I thought of you Tuesday when I went to see the new Anne Patterson art installation downtown - it's a lot like the beautiful one she did in SF at Grace Cathedral, only instead of using ribbon, she's using long strands of aluminum streamers that hang hundreds of feet above the ground, catching and throwing the natural light everywhere, gleaming. I thought of you as I went looking for clam chowder, somewhat randomly and exactly the way you and I did. Remember, my love? It was so cold that night and we wandered and wandered looking for a place that seemed just right before we finally found a beautiful old pub and settled into a cozy booth together to get warm. We were so hungry we not only had big bowls of delicious chowder but burgers too and even dessert! This trip I found the neatest little place right by the bridge, it's been there almost 90 years. You'd love it, my sweetheart. And I thought of you. I thought of you when I went for a long walk the next day and wound up in a lovely little coffee bar called The Kickstand Cafe (Boston is nearly as bike friendly as Davis, my darling!) and I sat quietly with a coffee and a sandwich and softly heard Bon Iver come on over the sound system. And I cried, my love. I cried so hard for you. My heart was so heavy with missing you today my little sweetheart. And I vow to do better with whatever time may be left of my life. To keep you close to my heart and listen carefully for your guidance. Always be with me, Summer, won't you please? And take me with and to you soon and forever. I love with you with all my heart and soul, my little sweetheart. Love you forever.

For Summer

Collected Plays comes out in print today, my little sweetheart. And it is, like every breath and moment and act of my life, for you. For you, my darling. For you, my love. For you, Summer. For you.