January 3, 2011
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The Daily News1 Happy everything to everybody. We’re all still alive and kicking, and that of itself becomes headlines for our new, spirited decade!
2 It’s nice to be back.
3 2011.
4 Who knew?
5 2011, btw, marks the fifteenth anniversary of the DN.
6 Wow.
7 The first DN dates back to roughly January or February of 1996, when we were doing my first directing job with Guys and Dolls. Fun, fun, fun days. I had been musical director of the same show years earlier, so it was fun to have continuity.
8 The year before I entered high school, which was somewhere around the time soup was invented, they did Guys and Dolls at my future high school. Suzanne Sommers was one of the leads.
9 She’s WAY older than I, before you start going into all of that. But my sister Linda was a junior at the time, so Guys and Dolls trickled into our garage, where all the high school hotshots would come to paint posters and deck out for the weekly football games.
10 By 1996, I had already established myself as a Guys and Dolls aficionado. Much earlier, I had been the musical director of the Show, and enjoyed working with my second band in as many years. A lot of people have no idea that I was ever a musical director of two bands.
11 Actually, I was just the mayor of a musical village at the time. Guitar players generally don’t make good musical directors because many of us could barely read music. I just handed the music out to a bunch of talented people who could read music, and then made them work their asses off.
12 Anyway, 1996 put me in charge of the entire production, which is again to say that I was just the mayor of the village, and walked around making sure nobody did anything stupid. Ponch and Fleming did the lion’s share of the work.
13 So somewhere in all of that, I realized that I needed to communicate with the entire Performing Arts’ department on a daily basis. Everybody had to know what was going on, who needed to be where and when, and so I began posting the Daily News on the now famous hallway leading into the Performing Arts’ office.
14 At first, it was a little ten-item piece the sole purpose of which was to inform.
15 That lasted around one minute.
16 It didn’t take long before I started goofing on things I would observe in life, and of our idiosyncracies, and began establishing the DN as not only informational, but also as a fun hobby, a lark to keep all of us from killing one another.
17 Worked, and it worked famously.
18 After a fashion, I began throwing in musings about nearly everything BUT the Show, and each morning became a morning of shits and giggles for everyone. Each day I would post a new one before anyone got in, stand back, read it, and chuckle at all the idiocy that somehow had spilled out of my frabjous brain the night before.
19 To this minute, I never see myself as the author of all this folderol.
20 Quite often, I wouldn’t even remember what I had put out there the night before, and I would join in on all the shits and giggles.
21 I always had the same sorta stuff that it has now, only sometimes more radical. I would protest wars, speak loudly about the stupidity of school administrators, and criticize anything that was stupid, including myself.
22 There would always be references to retro music and times, and lots of all sorts of other dandy things.
23 Sometimes Ponch, Shawna and I would sit in the office and enjoy strong cups of Ponch’s contraband coffee, which I’m certain came from some circus in Aruba. We’d close the office door because of the noise, and listen as ten or twelve students would gather ’round the DN and laugh, comment, and get the crazies.
24 I would actually have to go back into the hallway after everyone left, and read what it was I wrote, because I honestly never felt that I wrote it.
25 I was warned a couple of times by administrators that it wasn’t a good idea to leave a paper chase that could potentially get me into trouble.
26 Did I listen?
27 I did not listen; I’m not listening still.
28 Perhaps I never will.
29 And in that fifteen years, I can’t think of a time I didn’t get the DN out, although there might have been a few days when my printer wouldn’t work. I even had to hand-write the DN for a couple of weeks when there was printer failure.
30 It didn’t matter. I drew this picture of a guy I called Daily News guy. He had huge cartoony eyes and seven hairs on his head, one for each day of the week. I’d enclose a picture of him, but I write this edition of the DN at 4 a.m. and just don’t have a picture handy. I’m too lazy to draw one up, but I’ll try to throw him out there before the week is through.
31 So a happy anniversary to the world’s first blog. Okay, it wasn’t technically a blog, but it certainly was a foundation.
32 It took me all the way to 2002 I think before I started putting this stuff up online, and probably somewhere around 2004 before it actually archived on the now-ancient and wonderfully imperfect Xanga.
33 I have boxloads of hard copies sitting in a dusty box in my garage. It’s funny, because I always want to organize all of this for posterity, and just never get around to it. But I do believe that I still have hard copies dating back to 1997.
34 I have a little time this week; maybe I could pore through some of it. Every now and again I go through that box, which is a living history not only of the Drama Workshop, but of the Performing Arts’ Department that meant so much to so many.
35 Last year, my Drama Workshop website shut down on me because I refused to pay for it. I was a bit at war with Geocities (Remember Geocities? Yeesh.) because I had paid for upgrades that never worked, and it was a ridiculous thing trying to keep up a website that I couldn’t work on.
36 I think my last entries on ybdrama.com were in 2006.
37 My intention last year was to pay the stupid thirty bucks, or whatever it took, just to keep the thing from rusting in the weeds.
38 That website went back as far as 2002, and had a lot of archival DN’s as well as the Heidi Chronicles. As far as I know, I could still re-activate it, but it would take some searching.
39 That website was one of the earliest online websites that teachers kept. The ESUHSD had some goofy, rudimentary stuff that was pretty lame, and I wanted to establish a much cooler, streamlined website, which I did.
40 By today’s standards, it probably would look like an antique automobile. It already had a sepia feel to it, and lots of fun things, but I never was able to keep it going the way I would have liked.
41 So instead, I adopted Xanga as a much easier means of getting the DN out there, and so it remains.
42 I personally don’t think anything I’ve ever done is really worth keeping, because I still teach to this moment. I have gone past all of that, and am flying into a future that continues to be fun and exciting in my career.
43 I like to visit the past, but I don’t want to hang there for long periods, because life is about change and movement. I also feel that memories are like an abstract painting. I copped that from the story Marigolds by Eugenia Collier, but it’s a wonderful concept.
44 It’s all a dream, but often a wonderful dream full of hopes, cares, and love. It’s funny because every time I go into a theatre and smell the paint on the flats, or the feel color of the gels in the lights, or the sound of a mic check, it hurls me back to all of it.
45 Do I miss it?
46 Not in the least.
47 I just smile about it, and remember all the amazing moments and dazzling people who travled through it with me.
48 To that, I raise a glass this wet and whimsical morning. So…salud!
49 To the new decade, and to the fifteenth anniversary of the Daily News.
50 Have a great morning; have a great day, and enjoy a wonderful decade.
51 Oh.
52 And it’s Monday.
53 Fly low. ; ) <——– way cool sideways winky guy.
54 Peace.
~H~
