I’m still slowly making my way through the rough draft of my current writing project, but it appears I’ve settled on a project after that. Recently, a friend of mine was at a musical audition, and one of the grizzled showbiz vets at said audition told him he looked like a young Vic Damone. (The grizzled showbiz vet wasn’t wrong – my friend does resemble a young Vic Damone, and boasts a similar old-fashioned baritone.) When once he shared this on Facebook, I replied with the jest, “well it looks like you found your one-man show!” (Actors are constantly on the look-out for these, after all.) A few google searches later, and it dawned on me that there actually was sufficient material for an interesting one-man show, to say nothing of an actor willing to play the part. And so, this yet-unnamed piece jumped to the head of my on-deck line of writing projects.
If I do follow through with this plan for the Vic Damone piece, it will mean that of my last four scripts, three will have had their genesis on social media. Bay Ridge Lotus was inspired by a similar back-and-forth with a friend of mine on Twitter; Blanketing Merillon Avenue is a dramatization of an Election Day status update of mine from a few years back. (My current script actually stems from a much older inspiration, one pre-dating even my first email account. But that’s another story.)
All of which begs the question; am I spending too much time on Facebook?
To those worried that online interaction is both supplanting and poisoning our real lives, it probably seems like I’ve just supplied anecdotal evidence to support their worst fears. But artists have gathered in cafes and salons for centuries, having conversations precisely like the ones I describe above and fueling their inspiration in the exact same way. Is there really a difference?
Perhaps not. But perhaps, by moving the conversation into a digital landscape, it all becomes a little more unreal, and it’s easier for these ideas to peter out as daydreams rather than turn into real scripts and other works of art. It’s all a little early to tell, and we’re all still painfully learning just what we’re dealing with now that Mark Zuckerberg has opened Pandora’s box for us all.
In other news, if you haven’t already, please feel free to like my Facebook page.