What is the legacy you want to leave behind? As a person, you can hope your family will remember you. As an artist, you usually hope for a little more. If you're ambitious, you crave a lot more.
I began to reconsider this question as I walked from The Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco this week. I was among several hundred lucky people who got to see the first open dress rehearsal of the mega-hit musical Hamilton. We didn't have to pay, because the production wanted an audience to warm them up for their extensive run.
Before the show began, Director Thomas Kail introduced himself, and asked us not to Tweet or Facebook or Instagram our experiences. Because offering opinions about a show before it opens is just bad form.
But Kail also expressed that the experience of seeing this live production (a beautiful one, by the way, but don't mistake that for a review) was a shared experience that cannot be recreated through social media.
I once served Donald Trump dinner while a cater waiter in the 1980s, at The Frick Mansion, I recall, and in retrospect, it was the lowest day of my employed life. He didn't even clean his plate; total loser.
The arrogant, bigoted, serial adulterer and now-Republican presidential candidate –update: President-elect– was at the time one of New York City's many bloated egos of metropolitan life, and a mere casual mention in my second novel, Monkey Suits
. The book's main nemesis, as covered in a previous post, was a hybrid of closeted millionaire Malcolm Forbes and sinister writer and homophobe William F. Buckley, Jr.
Trump was just a sidebar, a boldface in the gossipy style of that book. I never could have imagined that we'd get to where we are today, mere hours from a presidential election where Hillary Clinton, a woman with decades of political experience, (update) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, against Trump, a bankrupt (financially and morally), bloviating serial lying asshole of preposterous proportions.
I was happy to see that my latest novel, Message of Love, was listed on the Boys in Our Books blog's Best of 2014.
The companion novel Every Time I Think of You, was also listed, since the reviewer gave both books a write-up, even though that was published in late 2011.
This keeps me going, along with my internal sense of tenacity, considering a few odd and unpleasant things that happened.
Another author outright stole my book title, and the mini-flame war on GoodReads proved that while (according to my book stats on that site), while 95% of readers liked or totally loved my recent books, a few vicious harpies went on the warpath when I dared to reply to an inane profanity-spewing post that wasn't even a review.
Capricious and catty alternated with glowing gushes of praise. You can enjoy a dozen delicious cupcakes, but if just one has a rat turd in it, you tend to remember that one more than others. Some wasted hours spent on GoodReads proved that my attackers do this day in and out to multiple other authors, and there's no pleasing a professional crank.
