Draped!

It got so cold while Loren and I were watching Dexter (the simultaneously macabre and charming Showtime series about a Miami Police forensics analyst who moonlights as a serial killer) that Loren interrupted our viewing pleasure to install drapes over the blinds in our living room window. He grabbed drapes that he had bought from Target (for particularly no good reason) and hung them up after much huffing, puffing, and hubabaloo. The drapes are a deep, dark red color that overwhelm our small, understated living room.

LOREN: What do you think?

PRINCE: I feel like I'm in a David Lynch movie.

I then began humming music from Twin Peaks, talking in gibberish, and walking backwards with the cat in my arms. Loren started humming the main theme from Twin Peaks and invented a character called The Lady in the White Chair.

We then went back to Dexter, and the lead character (played with iciness and charisma by Six Feet Under's Michael C. Hall) spent the rest of the evening gruesomely torturing his therapist. By the way, Dexter justifies his murder spree with the fact that he only kills bad people. The therapist, you see, drove three of his patients to suicide with a conscious yet subtle and undetected form of hypnotic suggestion.

The drapes are still up, and I'm hungry for cherry pie.

~~~~~

I plug people, not projects. So believe me when I tell you that I love my playwright friends John Levine (who went grad school when I did) and Ken Narasaki (who helped launch my career when he was literary manager at East West Players).

John, a big ol' Jew, has a new one-act play running December 1 to 8, 2006, at New Media Repertory in New York. It's called All Is Calm, and you should go see it. And Ken, a big ol' Asian, has a reading of an amazing new fell-length play (which he developed in one of my David Henry Hwang Writers Institute classes) on December 7, 2006 at Pan Asian Repertory, also in New York. It's called Innocent When You Dream, and you should go see it.

Please, nobody else ask me to plug anything on your behalf unless you know for a fact that I love you as much as I love John and Ken.

I'm serious.

—Reporting From Glendale, California