Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Okay, do you think that we, as a society, can all agree to stop saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”?

Because that’s not insanity; insanity is thinking you’re the Empress of China.

In the commuter rail terminal of Chicago’s Union Station, where I was this morning, a pleasant female voice makes frequent announcements. One of them is the following sentence:

In the interests of security, we are asking you, our passengers, to add your eyes and ears to that of our own.

The only way I can parse this is by assuming that “our own” is short for “our own young.” This allows for the interpretation that the Chicago commuter rail has children who have, collectively, not eyes and ears but one organ that functions simultaneously as an eye and an ear, and that it is asking its passengers to give up their eyes and ears, surely not an unreasonable request in the face of such mutational cruelty on the part of the universe, especially since the children are employed as station guards and their function as such is severely impaired by the lack of vision and hearing.

I am really hoping that somebody out there can come up with something better than this.

Here is part of a conversation I had with E.S. in bed last night:

E.S.: Ow! You bumped my nose.
FAUSTUS: I’m sorry.
E.S.: You should be more careful. You could have knocked it off.
FAUSTUS: It’s lucky that I didn’t. I wouldn’t love you if you didn’t have a nose.
E.S.: Would you love me if I had cancer?
FAUSTUS: Well, then you’d just die, and I wouldn’t have to love you.
E.S.: No, cancer of the nose, and I had to have a nasectomy.
FAUSTUS: Oh. No, I wouldn’t love you if you had a nasectomy. Unless you got a really natural-looking prosthesis.
E.S.: What about the really creepy times when it, like, fell off on the subway?
FAUSTUS: Definitely I wouldn’t love you then.
(Pause.)
FAUSTUS: But I’d love you again after you put it back on.
E.S.: I’m not sure I believe you.
FAUSTUS: You’ll never know until you remove your nose, will you?

Okay, the fucking was simulated, but still.

There’s nothing quite like not being able to sleep and turning on the television at 1:30 in the morning and flipping to a documentary about an amateur-porn film festival and seeing a girl you were friends with in college starring in a backstage movie of a fifties-style musical as a singing strawberry who makes a mistake and gets spanked and then fucked by a menacing stagehand while her cohorts the snail, the flower, and the other random horticultural element I am too tired to remember look on and continue singing to keep you staring at your ceiling until you have to get out of bed and go to a meeting even though the image still haunts you so vividly that you might as well have stayed home for all the use you are.

“I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now,” Nagin said. “I was listening to what people were saying–they didn’t know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware.”

Why is this not the lead story in the Times?

Oh, right, because of liberal media bias.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

So apparently Joan Allen came to my show on Friday. Before curtain, she told the artistic director of the theater that she had to leave at intermission, because she had an early flight the next morning. Then intermission came . . . and she stayed. She said she couldn’t bring herself to leave. She told him after it was over that she’d loved it.

I’m floating a little bit right now.

When last night’s presentation clocked in at just under three hours, we decided to cut the number.

So I guess my enemies are safe for the time being.

There is a song in the Holocaust musical I’m writing in which a member of the Jewish Council of Elders is forced to draw up lists of names of people to be sent east on trains to Auschwitz. At one point in the song, his wife sings name after name, and after every one, he sings, “The train.”

When we wrote this song a few months ago, the lyricist gave me a historically accurate list of names of people who had been sent east. The problem was that the music I had written was longer than the list, so when I had reached the end of the names there were still several measures of wordless music.

It was very late at night, so I couldn’t call him and ask for more names. I considered doing some online research and coming up with more names on my own, but the fact that such a step would have required actual work on my part made me dismiss it almost instantly as a viable possibility.

So I ended up just using the names of people I don’t like. Men who turned me down for dates when I was single, writers who have won awards for which I applied even though they are less talented than I am, my fifth-grade teacher who was so mean to me–in the presentations of my show tonight through Saturday, they’re all headed out to be gassed.

I had to fuck with the pronunciations of certain names to make them fit the music. Ordinarily I would be so appalled at the thought of a misset word as to shrink in horror from anyone who suggested such a thing, but in this case the feeling is outweighed by the enormous satisfaction I feel every time I hear that one of my enemies is on his or her way to the showers.

Perhaps I’ve been working on this show too long.

Let me get this straight: the government has been illegally spying on us for years, and our president, after promising to do whatever it takes to rebuild Louisiana, opposes the only adequate Katrina relief plan anybody has come up with–a plan that enjoys wide bipartisan support–because it might cost as much as three months of the war in Iraq and is therefore too expensive, and the company formerly run by our vice president has been awarded a $400 million contract to build concentration camps even though they send rotten meat to our troops overseas, and all we can talk about is how the vice president shot somebody?

Though I guess even the greatest of tragedies need comic relief every few quires or so.