Faithful!

Today I got in a conversation about the Stephen King/Stewart O'Nan book about the Red Sox' historic 2004 season, the book that we sold, oh, only about a billion copies of that Christmas, and I drew a complete and total blank on the title. It was flat-out weird. I kept telling my friend "it's something with an F...like a two syllable word...about fans..." Very strange. I could see the cover and everything. I could HEAR my boss' voice saying, "We just got two more boxes of ,mgoirshguoj in the back." But tonight I came home and went on-line to look it up and literally as I typed in a certain bookselling web site it came to me that it was Faithful.

Man, I would stack dozens and dozens of copies of that book and then turn around two minutes later and they'd be gone. It was out of control. For that Christmas season, it was even more out of control than The Da Vinci Code, which remained out of control and from what I hear is out of control all over again with the movie. I think the movie opens here next week. Whatever, Da Vinci code. Oh, and by the way people, it's still fiction.

So, here's something worthwhile! We are in the final week approaching our play, Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark. It is Ariel Dorfman's weaving together of the words of dozens of human rights activists from around the world, taken from the text of their interviews in Kerry Kennedy's book Speak Truth to Power. I have been very interested in this play since hearing of it a couple years ago, and I am so excited to have the opportunity to direct and produce it here.

Furthermore, in a display of the ever fortuitous and synchronicitous universe, the book has just been translated into Korean, and the Speak Truth to Power foundation is coming to Korea this month for a symposium in Seoul and the launching of a three-city tour of the accompanying exhibit. I have been in contact with the U.S. people for a couple months, and they put me in touch with the Korea Democracy Foundation, and so forth. We were invited to perform at the symposium in Seoul, so that has been really exciting, and we have been working very hard throughout April rehearsing and preparing.

Now, it's May and the symposium in Seoul is this coming Friday, May 12!! We will stay the night in Seoul, too, and you know what that means: I'll be in Seoul to eat Mexican food on my birthday! Wahoo! After we go to Seoul this weekend, we will perform in Daegu the next weekend May 20-21. The Daegu performances will of course be at the arts space I've mentioned before, where we've had poetry slams, etc., with our little Daegu artists' community renaissance.

I'm super busy and will try to post more about this, but in the meantime check out the web site: http://speaktruthtopower.org