Wordstock...

...was this weekend in Portland.  I went today, first with Justin to check out the small comic section, then hung out on my own and went to the Stages of Playwriting panel with C.S. Whitcomb, Marc Acito, and Storm Large.  It was heavy on entertainment and laughs, but kind of short on substance about playwriting.  Not that I have big aspirations to start writing plays, but if I had gone to the panel for that reason I would have left kind of annoyed.  The moderator was Marc Acito's boyfriend, and to be honest he didn't really ask them questions that had to do with the 'stages of playwriting.'  There were questions about how they each focused on a different medium before writing plays (C.S. Whitcomb TV and film, Marc Acito books, Storm Large song lyrics).  Again, interesting but not about playwriting.  Another pro/con was that they all seem to be pretty good friends with each other, which made for a laid back and playful atmosphere, but also led to a fair number of inside jokes and more chatting that was completely off topic.  I'm making it sound worse than it actually was.  It was interesting hearing Storm talk about how her one woman play 'Crazy Enough' came to be.  Also about why C.S. Whitcomb finds playwriting the most difficult of all the different writing she's done.  And Marc Acito pointing out that, in musical theater, if every time they sing the word 'dance' in a song, in your mind replace it with 'fuck,' it starts to make way more sense ("I could have danced all night long," etc.).

After that I walked around all the vendors, killing time till my mom showed up and went to see Shawn Levy's reading.  The thing about Wordstock is that even though it's in this huge exhibit hall with hundreds of people, it's still oddly quite because everyone is talking like they're in a library.  So instead of a loud roar of voices, p.a. systems, and more voices trying to be heard over the first voices, it was just a din in the background.  It was a little off-putting to be honest.

Just before four my mom arrived and we headed in to grab seats at the Powell's Stage.  Shawn Levy is the chief film critic for the Oregonian, and has written numerous books on various Hollywood celebrities.  Jerry Lewis, Sinatra and the Rat Pack, and his most recent is a biography of Paul Newman.  His talk was pretty interesting.  He spent a lot of time explaining how he is a journalist first and foremost, and so bringing a journalist's ethics to writing a biography means he puts quite a bit more time into researching the person and stories to make sure they're true.  He won't just put in the book every tawdry and salacious tale he is told; he has to do supplemental interviews to try and find a witness or a corroborating story.  Like I said, interesting...His new book on Paul Newman doesn't really interest me, but I just put his book about the Rat Pack on hold at the library.  I'll let you know how it is...