I was at another Noh theatre and music workshop last week. People might start to think I'm really into Noh.... and they would be getting it fairly right. I was already a couple of weeks into a Noh/ Kyogen workshop this winter, all the while asking myself what the hell was I doing learning something so new and far removed from the skills I should actually be perfecting, when I had an epiphany.

I don't remember the I first time I met Christine.  She knew me through plays I submitted to the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, but I don't remember the first time meeting her.  We would run into each other regularly but infrequently over the last five years, and every time get a little deeper into the discussions about what moved and inspired us as artists.

The thing you notice - or at least I noticed - about Daveed is how quiet he is.  I first met him in the whirlwind that was my New York Hip Hop Theater Festival experience (my play Rewind was being workshopped by director Daniel Banks).  Daveed was the stage manager for the show, and as such I had little direct contact with him since he was so quiet, and I was more than a little overwhelmed.  What I do remember is basically anyone and everyone I was around at the time was incredibly talented and smart, and Daveed was no exception.

Back around 1999, I spent many hours behind a couch playing a hand-puppet dog in the staged-reading of a play called Monkey by Nicola Hardwood.  My crouch-mate (ouch) was Anne McCaw, who was the the dog's "mother" and Punch to my Judy.  The play was a wild ride, and the experience cemented my and Anne's interest in creating a puppet play together, so we dutifully pulled together a rag-tag team of friends in the SFSU theatre department to help us develop this play.

That's when I first met Nicole