How was your weekend? And if you're wondering why I'm asking you about your weekend on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, it's because I teach Tuesday - Friday, so today is a Monday for me. So, sorry to interrupt, how was it? Oh, good. Mine was swell. I rested and wrote. Last week was a bit of a crazy week for me (I had evening tasks nearly every night of the week!), and so it was nice to curl up with my kiddos and watch some Olympics. I couldn't only do that though, and that's because it was a PlayGround writing weekend!
Yes! On Thursday evening I headed up to MSRI (MSRI stands for: Mathematical Sciences Research Institute) and heard a lot of interesting information about prime numbers, number theory, and a mathematician named Yitang Zhang, who bridged the prime number gap. Don't have any idea what I'm talking about? Fantastic, you're the perfect person to come out next Monday (February 17th) for PlayGround's 11th Annual Math Night! RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1388459164752108/?ref=5. And get tickets here: http://playground-sf.org/monday/! It's an evening of freshly written plays, preformed for the first time in front of an audience and they all are written off of the math theme: A PASSION FOR PRIMES.
I won't lie, this topic had me more than a little stumped. I came up with a brilliant plan of attack to start with, and quickly realized that I'd bitten off more than I could chew. I regrouped and wrote a pretty terrible futuristic sci-fi play (with aliens!), became frustrated, wrote another play that was totally off-topic (it's a play I've been wanting to write for a while now and I thought that maybe I had to get it out before I could take another, hopefully more serious, crack at the Math Topic), and finally wrote the play I ended up submitting this morning. I am proud at how well my play came together, and one of the great things about writing a new play each month is that even if it doesn't get selected, I have a new play that I can submit all over town! Hooray!
My play is called The Happiness Gap, and in the end it did all the things I wanted it to do. Will it make it in for the reading? Only time will tell! Check back on Friday to see if I made the cut!