LJ: Fush with brame

Ian, Renfield and I went out with Billy Bermingham last night after going to Eat First, and among the other things discussed, there was a brief conversation about the women in the cat of Dingleberries. (Billy is a somewhat renowned playwright out of Chicago who wrote "Potty mouth" in Dingleberries and one of Cherry Red's most successful plays, Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack.) Billy was attracted to Karen, and Renfield mentioned how he found Sarah Painter the more preferable of the two. Ian made some sort of comment about how the two Coyote Women were attractive, a sentiment I didn't agree with, citing that I found them to be too skinny. Ian then posed to the table, "Do you guys think Monique is hot?" I nodded emphatically. Ian goes, "really?". Me: "Yeah. I used to have a major crush on her." Tee-hee. Ian: "Really? What happened, did it just kind of fade away?". A brief pause while I considered the most accurate response that wouldn't alarm Ian unnecessarily, then, "Yeah, for the most part." Ian then mentioned how he kind of agreed (which is a pretty reliable point of view, as Ian is gay), and how he'd seen her backstage while changing during intermission and thought she had a nice body. I just nodded.

Going out with Billy Bermingham last night was something of an adventure. He's probably the most famous person I've hung out with for any length of time. Cannibals has been translated and produced in a number of countries besides the US. He started the Torso theater company in Chicago to give a venue to the play up there (the play ran for a shockingly long ten years there), a company he shut down only a couple of years ago (probably because the cash cow that Cannibals was finally closed). He and Ian did most of the conversing, though Renfield and I would chime in from time to time. He generally liked what we did with Potty Mouth, though according to him it was somewhat miscast - he'd always seen the play portrayed by a younger couple, something that really wasn't made clear by the stage directions. But I think he had a good time, overall, and got a favorable impression of Cherry Red. Ian's been dealing with him somewhat adversarially lately... minor bickering about the rate Billy charges to produce his stuff is substantially higher than Ian's used to paying a playwright. Billy, as Ian has been wont to say lately, has been being a twat about letting us have the rights to his other major hit, Shannen Dougherty Shoots A Porno, and has even threatened to pull Potty Mouth out of Dingleberries unless he gets a larger pull from the box office, something Ian is (naturally) adamantly opposed to. (As a contingency, Ian had the thought that we would keep the show as it is right up to the moment the characters in Potty mouth would begin speaking, then someone would come out and stand downstage of the actors and flip through a stack of cue cards (a la Dylan) saying something about how they should be seeing a fairly funny play about being so rich and so bored that fetishism was the only thing left to these two, but because of a contractual conflict with the playwright, you get cue cards instead. It's an idea that, if developed correctly, could be really funny, but I kind of doubt it will come to that.

It was just interesting watching Ian and Billy discussing this sort of back room stuff - as Tony Greenberg remarked to me today as I was telling him the story of what happened after he left (he'd gone to Eat First with us, as had his boyfriend Antonio and Karen Novack, but did not go out after to Fado), it would be interesting for someone who might be interested in running their own theatre company one day. I don't know if he thinks I intend on running a company someday or not (I certainly don't know that one way or the other - I'm very happy with the Cherry Red gig right now, and that's about as far as I've gotten with it), but he's absolutely right in saying it was interesting to see that conversation.