I almost have a cast. Come on, Bob Cratchit and Belle, you know you'll be glad for a few hundred bucks this Christmas!

Robert Graves is a good writer and all, but aren't all WWI memoirs the same? Trench memoirs, I mean. Life in the trench, knee-deep water, blood, snipers, rats, everyone gets gassed (although admittedly, this is the first time I've read details of the Allies gassing the Germans, or rather, trying to, the wind was wrong and the gas rolled back into their own trenches), hardly killing any Germans, rotting corpses everywhere, periodic orders to go over the top with appalling casualties, etc. I'm curious now to understand exactly how the stalemate ends. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favorite books, and I think it's pretty much what a person needs to know about the Great War.

Does anyone know of a similar novel or memoir about WWII, written from the German point of view? I'm not aware of one but would like to read it. It was enlightening to read about the Japanese point of view in The Rape of Nanking. Hitler's Willing Executioners doesn't count, I want a soldier's story.

Found out today I'm eligible for city-paid flu shots at my local senior center. My mom and I have an on-going argument about whether or not I'm middle-aged. I keep saying, "How old do you think people get to be?" and she says, "If you're middle-aged, then I'm old, and I'm not old." But when I told her about the shots, she said, "Ouch!"

First round of auditions tonight, and people keep canceling. I could have filled these early time slots over and over, would-be Scrooges!

Oh, and I had my first conscientious objector. Overwhelmingly, the response from the theater world has been they love the idea of presenting a strong point of view, but this guy wants nothing to do with my message, which is a-okay. Good thing he doesn't feel so strongly about it that he'd try to get a part in order to sabotage the show. I'd feel the same way about some stage version of "Triumph of the Will" or something.

Off now to photocopy sides so we can hear cold-reading English accents. Greg and I differ on the subject of accents--I'm agin' 'em, they always make me worry--but I realized with relief yesterday I can say my piece, but this is Greg's decision. I'm anxious enough about my own.

Eleven hundred actors want to be in my play. Words . . . none.

Wait, here come some words. It reminds me of the HR days, let the rejecting begin. (One criterion I'm tempted to use is people who put play titles in quotation marks instead of italicizing them. Too ignorant for me.) There was an option on Actors Access, the casting website I'm using, to let actors attach a note, which I did. So far, no one has written what I'm looking for, what I wanted was to give someone the opportunity to say they're "of the church", or have always seen Scrooge the same way or are otherwise emotionally motivated to be in the show. I remember pawing through a hundred resumes at the City Paper without seeing the magic words, 'I want this job because I love the CP and want to be part of what you do'. If you're ever looking for work, remember that's a powerful sentiment. Everyone needs a job for him or herself, I want to know why this job, why my job. Without sounding crazy, of course.

Advice given to poet Robert Graves upon leaving his school, Charterhouse, "Good-bye, Graves, and remember this, that your best friend is the waste-paper basket."

I've devised a cunning plan to watch "Maury" guilt-free. (Although I would say I don't like the show, I'm nevertheless drawn to it for some reason, but if I watch it at home, the TV tends to stay on, not only wasting big chunks of prime productivity time, but giving me a bad feeling about the world and people in general.) Today, I'm taking my ear buds to the Y and will watch Maury on the elliptical trainer.

Big news! If a person were so inclined, they could buy a ticket to my play:

http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/shows/god-bless-you-mister-scrooge_160608/

More details to come. Next week--casting!

Here are pix of my local synagogue's sukkot hut. If you're an old-school Jew, and here in Blyn, we've got Jews who (as we say in wrestling) went to the school they burned down to build the old school, you prepare food and eat in the hut for seven days to remember what Moses et al went through in the desert. Where there were, apparently, at least three kinds of trees.

I have rented a theater. The wheels are in motion, Jerry, more about that soon!

Are conditions in the lower rack of the dishwasher really so much harsher than the upper?

Perfect autumn moment in NYC yesterday: the screw in my skull is firmly rooted, paving the way for filling of vacancy in tooth line-up; my mom's cancer surgery went better than anyone could have asked, there's no indication that it spread, but she's taking the optional radiation anyway, and it was a beautiful clear day, so I had a glass of wine on the roof of the Met, where they now have a cool sculpture that looks like a big branchy fallen silver tree that you have to step over in places to get around.

I'm anxiously awaiting a response from La Tea theater on the Lower East Side as to whether they accept my proposal for renting it for Scrooge. And I'm not even 100% sure which answer I want.