Nobody cares what you dreamed last night. No one cares what you dream, ever. No one cares about your dreams.

Life: You absolutely can do it alone.

Society has no parents.

Nine-tenths of the things we worry about never happen. Nine-tenths of the things we wish and hope for also never happen. (Only 10% of things happen.)

People pay good money to ride rollercoasters, so why should I complain about my mood disorders?

Paranoia is just a fancy word for hypervigilance.

Procreation should be safe, legal and rare.

…

Distorted thinking gives you material.

Wasting lots of food means you’re rich.

Having the power to hurt people’s feelings is the best.

These Shraxims are brilliant.

I think we’ve all been polite toward the audience long enough.

Smart people are fat.

I have matching persecution and prosecution complexes.

Remember that when you ask the creators of an acknowledged classic if they knew it would become a classic as they were creating it, they should always say no. If they say yes, it’s not really a classic.

…

They’re not LIES, they’re DREAMS.

He travels fastest who travels alone.

If you can’t say anything interesting, don’t say anything at all.

Drag (tranvestitism for entertainment purposes) is a form of minstrelsy.

Being in a romantic relationship makes the participants proud because it is “public unrejectedness.”

Maybe if homosexuality had been as acceptable when I was a kid as it is becoming now, I would have elected to be heterosexual.

You make do with the boring rut because the chance of completely messing up your life is too great when you change things.

.

MIXING IT UP WITH STORY PEOPLE

Story League has now had two “Mixers,” which are a way for story artists and those curious about the story business to meet up and talk. That’s how business is done, after all! Fun business and work business. D.C. is famous for its productive happy hours, and I wanted Story League to get into that scene. We chose two of the coolest bars in town: The Gibson and Dickson Wine Bar. Where will the next one be? Suggestions welcome.

In the last few months Story Leaguers also made performative appearances at Salon Contra (The Pink Line Project) and BloomBars to broaden our base. And Cathy Alter and I shared producing responsibilities on our third show with the talented Natalie E. Illum. And we want to keep involving other Leaguers at that level, too! Ask us about it.

Woody Allen it was, I believe, who said that “80% of success is just showing up.” (Often misquoted as “90% of life…”) Well, the other 20% is staying put. Constancy is how you build a successful group. With each successive (and successful) show Story League has put on, more people have glommed on! Because the longer you are around, the more people feel confident signing on with you.

Continuity. Centrality. That’s why I started publishing a newsletter, the Weekly Leaguer, which I email to select people and also post at the FB page. It lists the week’s “show picks” from the whole region (see next section) as well as Story League news about upcoming events. I would like to expand its scope a little and do a spotlight on a story person each week. You wanna be the first one?

The DC Magazine article written by People’s District proprietor Danny Harris shows that there is a growing community of story groups in D.C., and we are all intertwined. Not just because familiar faces pop up in all of our shows (which is natural) but because we share a passion for the story business. I hope to see even more groups/shows form! Even just since the article hit early this month, BYT‘s Andrew Bucket and 365DC writer Mary-Alice Farina have put on new story shows, and are bringing in a huge, young, hip, new audience (as well as fresh storytelling faces) to the art form.

Meanwhile Capital Fringe is finally over, with all of its promotional postcarding and ceaseless going-to of shows by me and the other Leaguers to shows with our friends in them (Vijai, Tom/Karl, Adam, Molly, Joe/Amy/Jason/Chuck, Alex). I think it’s important that we all support one another.

LINKING THE STORY PEOPLE OF THE EAST COAST METROPLEX

Besides being open and inclusive to all, I think the most positive thing about Story League is that we are building connections with other story clubs in other cities. We included three performers from Baltimore in our first show, one performer from Philadelphia (Katonya Mosley) in our second show, our third show was hosted by New York City’s delightful Robin Gelfenbien, and our first encore show has another New Yorker, Michele Carlo, as its host.

(Note: Our good friends at First Person Arts in Philadelphia — as well as some other story orgs around the country — also have done this. Their “Slam Nation” show in April had former slam winners and tellers from New York, Baltimore [Story Leaguer Jon Aaron], and Boston.)

But the big merger so far is the “Politics of Science” show at Artisphere we are co-producing with Ben Lillie and his show series The Story Collider, which is based in Brooklyn. Bringing talent down the I-95 corridor raises the visibility of D.C. story artists in New York, which has a much larger storytelling community. And it introduces D.C. audiences to new storytellers they haven’t seen around town before.

I have also assiduously maintained an Events Calendar with all of the literary, poetry, comedy, and story events I can find up and down the East Coast. Send me your event and I’ll put it up.

And finally, I myself have become peripatetic, bouncing among D.C., Baltimore, NYC and Philly all the time to see or be in shows. It’s fun. And since I don’t understand much about Twitter, I’ve made this my main tweeting activity: Posting photos that I take at shows.

BRINGING MORE COMPETITION TO A TOWN THAT LOVES IT

The two major political parties make sure Washington, D.C., is perpetually submerged in an internecine blood feud. The need to win runs wild in our “Hollywood for Ugly People” here. So I say, why not tap in to that sexy battle vibe with a new (to D.C.) form of nightlife activity: Story Contests. (Usually known as “slams.”)

So far mainly The Moth in various cities and First Person Arts in Philly are the only two major “slam”-sponsoring organizations that I know of. Well, old Shrake here has been planning a new take on the story slam especially for Story League. As I said in “The Story of Story League, Part 1,” I’ve been studying — while participating in — story slams for over a year now. I have a long list of new things to try, new ways to run a competition.

So mark your calendars for Thursday, September 8. That is the date of the first Story League Story Contest! It will take place at 9 PM (Oooh! Grownup time!) at Busboys & Poets at 14th and V Streets in D.C. Doors will open at 8:30. Get your 7-minute (original, not previously told on any other stages) stories ready… and may the best story win! If you’re wondering what the “theme” is: The theme is don’t be boring. Just focus on making us laugh, cry, faint, think, and/or puke. More details to come. And as always, ALL are welcome to enter the contest!

Love, Scott

But I’m paying cash, I said. I won’t have a ticket or pass. Don’t I need a transfer slip? “The bus takes you right inside the station and you can get on the T for free because you’re already in the system,” he repeated.

____

He’s right. I’m in the system now. Not really prison. A system of strivers. People with microphones in their profile pics. Dues-paying semi-nobodies trying to get a name for themselves so they can finally get paid for this sht. Day-job-having or trust-fund-milking, attention-needing show-bo’s going from bar to club to small theatre to big theatre to teevee and books and movies. A fraction of one percent of them (us) will even get to the small theatre…

And the sealed station system metaphor works because I’m 40 and I just started in the live story business and there is no way out now, I am in the system, maybe I’ll have to ride around and around until I starve or die of exhaustion, but I paid my two bucks and that’s that. A 26-year-old can leave the station system because they’re so sick of and done with this system, they will just walk or drive or something. Not me. I can keep transferring lines but never exit. I can’t quit. I can fck up or fail umpteen times, but when you’re 40 and you’ve finally found what you want to do, you must just keep on regardless.

____

I had had a notion that I should try stand-up, as a cross-training exercise. So a comedian friend very generously arranged a spot in a comedy club’s Saturday night “showcase” for me. When I saw my name on the club’s website, surprised that this was really going to happen, I knew, for the first time since I’ve started performing, what real fear is.

It was like that dream we’ve all had where you have to take a test but you never went to the class. I stared at my name — I used my real name, at least, so any evidence would be semi-hard to find when I bombed. And I purposely did it in Boston, far from home. I thought, with light panic, “This is a great opportunity. But… I don’t have a routine. I don’t have any stand-up jokes.”

So with help from my friend Adam, I condensed all the “laugh lines” from the stories I’ve told so far around the country — all four laugh lines — into a chunk. Then I tried to build them out from laugh lines to full jokes. So now I had two laugh lines and two jokes nestled into a few mini-stories. And that’s what I did onstage. I was done in under 5 minutes.

The fear that gripped my innards when I saw my name in the lineup was nothing compared to the fear just before I went on. I haven’t felt this way since I was an uncoordinated sissy kid who was forced to play dodgeball in gym class. Can’t someone prevent what is about to happen? I thought. I want my mommy, I thought. I actually visualized her rescuing me. I don’t want to do this, I thought.

____

I thought the G.L.O.C. and all the woman comedians I know who are always harping about what an exclusionary He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club the comedy world is were probably exaggerating. Then I found myself in a lineup of 8 straight white American guys plus me. I was the closest thing to diversity because I am a gay.

Toward the middle of the night, I asked my confidant, one of the other comedians in the show with me, who such-and-such over there was, and he said, “Oh, that guy’s a stand-up but he’s not in the show. He’s just here to be seen. He just wants people to see him standing near the stage tonight.” Hm. So that’s how up-and-coming comics spend their Saturday nights? I guess it beats my usual VIP drinks party for one in front of the TV. But it’s still oddly sad.

My confidant (he was the only one I told that I hadn’t done this before) was so kind to me, making me feel welcome in this tense place sprinkled with strivers. People are so generous to me it makes me cry for real (only when I’m alone, though, duh). He tried to lighten things up by saying he wanted me to bomb out totally — so that I’d get a funny story out of it.

When I came down off the stage and back to the booth where my confidant was, we agreed that I had neither killed nor bombed. “I went down the middle,” I said. He said, “Yeah, but you committed.” I took that as a compliment. He knew how I felt when the first few things I said got anemic little laughs because the crowd could sense I wasn’t a proper stand-up… But I chose to keep going with what I was going to do, flawed as it was. I didn’t choke or freeze up. I didn’t start apologizing or negotiating or blaming the audience or anything. I did zero “crowd work,” because let’s face it, that’s for pros. Too terrifying for me right now. My job was to deliver my handful of “jokes” and tell my little story and a half, then say thank you and put the mic back on the stand and go drink a bourbon on the rocks.

Did those things. At a well-known and -respected comedy club. Now I’ve got that memory behind me, pushing me into a confidence zone. Watch out, Road! I might be coming down you soon. With my “stand-up set.” It will be a long time before I lose the scare quotes when I say that.

The less important someone is, the longer they need to talk on their cell phone.

It’s sad when good-looking people die.

Community is a myth.

Hate is the answer.

Rehearsing for a show is like gay sex: Tedious, hollow, humiliating, repetitive, fruitless and pointless-seeming. An insult to the real thing.

The “Millennial” Generation are so imbecilic that none of them can even spell the name of their own generation correctly.

Do the things that worst frighten you so that you can brag afterward about how courageous you are.

Someone advised: “Be the boyfriend you want to have.” Well, no, obviously. I will follow this advice instead: “Be the entertainer you want to be a fan of.”

You say: “judgmental.” I say: “smart.”

.

.

When I was a kid my parents had a book published by Playboy Magazine Press called THE MOVIE BOOK. It had a couple nude movie stills from, like, Last Tango in Paris and such, but otherwise it was a G-rated coffee table book. There was a chapter called Legends, and the caption for the photo of Marlene Dietrich read: “By far the most exotic of Hollywood’s creations, a screen goddess of the 1930s whose image remains eternally haunting.” That was all I needed to read. Over and over.

…

In one of my Barbra Streisand books it quotes someone as saying Streisand had “the best legs since Dietrich.” I started to think I had nice legs too after reading this.

…

I tried to collect every book written about her. I got about 28? by the time I was 28. In some cases I used interlibrary loan, and when the book came in I photocopied the whole thing and kept that.

…

Before the real Marlene, I was first exposed to Madeline Kahn’s impersonation of/tribute to Marlene in the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles (I saw it when I was about 10). She does a song called “I’m Tired,” in the character of Lili von Shtupp, playing off of Marlene’s character Frenchy in Destry Rides Again. All-around funny movie, one of our favorite pizza-and-rented-(from-the-pizza-parlor)-VCR-Friday-night choices, my younger brother and me, when we were kids.

…

There was an episode of M*A*S*H where Radar O’Reilly is part of some plot on the base there, and he’s to stand outside a tent smoking a cigarette as a signal to someone. Someone asks someone, “Is that Radar?” to which the other person replies, “Either that, or Marlene Dietrich is back in town.”

…

Grandma Shrake told me once, when I was a teenager, with visible and audible disdain, regarding Marlene Dietrich, “I never believed she was a woman.”

…

When I was about 15 I started plucking my eyebrows to look like Marlene’s drawn-on ones, which I didn’t realize were drawn on. My dad approached me one day in the basement and asked, head cocked and eyes slitted, with a tired-out, suspicious tone, “Scott, have you been… um, doing something to your eyebrows there?” First I denied it. Then I admitted it but gave the reason as being that my eyebrows “hurt” if I didn’t pluck them. “Don’t do that anymore,” he said flatly. And I didn’t.

…

…

Marlene was 30 years old when she became famous for The Blue Angel. She was famous for another 61 years after that.

…

She helped a lot of gay and Jewish friends emigrate out of Nazi Germany to Hollywood. Legend has it Hitler himself wanted to bring her back to Germany to be THE aryan star. Instead he had to make do with a Swede who could speak German, Zarah Leander.

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Her sister was married to a concentration camp guard in Germany during World War II. Marlene denied in public that she had a sister.

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My favorite Dietrich film is the extravagant swansong of her years-long svengali collaboration with Josef von Sternberg:  The Devil Is a Woman. I like how emotionally sadistic she is to the male characters in that movie, her lovers. I hate men.

…

She hated Madonna and Meryl Streep.

…

Dietrich met the Beatles at a variety show and liked them and their music. They liked her too. Hence her appearance on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

…

She quit smoking in her 70s. Won a bet with Noël Coward on who could quit, he died of lung cancer not long after she won.

…

She never received an Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, or anything like that.

…

When they discovered Dietrich had run out of money in her old age but wanted to continue living in France, the city government of Paris passed a special law: “Marlene Dietrich is not allowed to pay any rent in the City of Paris.” The city covered her rent quietly.

…

When I was living in Germany my Junior year of college, someone tipped me off that the then-90-year-old Dietrich was going to call in to a show, a tribute to the Babelsberg UFA studios where “The Blue Angel” was filmed. We watched the show, me and a couple Ami buddies. Dietrich calls in and says a few things in German, then before hanging up she says, in English, “Love, Marlene.” Like she was reading a letter? But she wasn’t. Then this big military band kicks in and plays “Falling in Love Again” — it was very tacky, schmaltzy, this show, and I said “Fucking nazis!” Later my German friend Sabine heard me say it on an audio tape I had made of the TV show airing, and her face dropped.

…

I walked down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1991, a year before she died, looking up at the windows, wondering if she were looking down at me.

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My friend Andy called me at the movie theatre where I worked in college to tell me Marlene had died.

…

Like most 20th-century female stars, she moved her birth year up by a few years (it was 1901, not 1904), and largely got away with it because there was no Internet back then. And her birth certificate would have been in a city hall in Berlin someplace, probably destroyed during the war.

…

My mom told me she thought of me when she saw the news Marlene had died. “I know how much you liked her,” she said.

…

I went to her gravesite in Berlin. She’s not buried right next to her mother. Her mother is catty-corner from her. I left a rose on her gravestone.

…

Was she always a ghost? Isn’t it incidental that some actual woman had to be Marlene Dietrich, for surely the idea of her and its mystery were only waiting to be freed.

David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition

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All of her lines in the movie Touch of Evil were improvised, including, “You’d better lay off the candy bars,” said to Orson Welles. And “What does it matter what you say about people?”

…

Her memoir was largely fictionalized.

…

Stinky gave me the Biographical Dictionary of Film me as a gift. On one of our first dates, we had an argument in which I pointed out that Marlene used her married name, “Sieber,” when checking in to hotels and such, to throw reporters off the trail; Stinky responded by saying Stevie Nicks did the same thing. He liked her a lot. Our argument was about how those two people and those two facts are not comparable. I was offended he could mention Nicks and Dietrich in the same breath.

…

As a performer she was a diseuse, which is a French word for “talk singer.” She seems only to have one octave, and really just delivers songs in a melodic speaking voice.

…

I modeled the way I speak German after Marlene’s way. I’m a diseur.

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She spoke better French, apparently, than English or German. Her German toward the end is actually so bad, so slow and riddled with weird errors, that it makes me doubt she really was born and raised in Germany.

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I wanted to write my dissertation (in the German Department) about Marlene Dietrich’s accent. I quit grad school instead, which I imagine she would have wanted me to do.

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Her daughter wrote a “Marlene Dearest”-type book in the early 1990s, right after Marlene died. Nice. Nice, grateful daughter. Always good to wait till someone is in the ground and cannot defend themselves. A lot of what I know about MD comes from that book. Actually, I believe every unflattering and flattering thing her daughter wrote, but that is not the point.

…

In the mid-’90s, several years after she died, her estate sold her image to be used in print ads for Breathe Right. One of the tan snore-prevention strips was superimposed on her nose. “Commentary superfluous,” as we say in German (“Kommentar überflüssig”).

…

Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the boys anyway, have the last name Riva. So look for them as you go out around in the world. Ask them: Is Marlene Dietrich your ancestor?

…

Thank the Lord, they have still never gotten a biopic done. Some stage plays, yes. Drag performances? Sometimes. But they have not desecrated her silver-screen legacy with some travesty like Gwyneth Paltrow or Uma Thurman trying to be like her in a movie.

…

Like all famous people, she was very petite, I’m guessing about 5´2˝, based on her dress from The Devil Is a Woman that I saw displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, back in the ’90s when I used to hang out there a lot.

…

I don’t do drag much, but in grad school a friend had a variety-show party where everyone had to perform, so I put on half-drag and did a lip-synch (using a boombox) to the epic “Hot Voodoo” number from Blonde Venus. It was not as successful as the belly dancer at the party.

…

My friend named her daughter “Marlena” after being exposed to my Dietrichmania for so many years. She used an “a” on the end to discourage people from saying “Marleen” and she pronounces it “Marlayna,” the proper way.

…

Just the other day I was at the fabric store getting a replacement silk-covered button for my tuxedo, and while I was looking at the buttons a 50s-ish woman told a very old woman — they were both customers — that she was looking for fabric to sew a dress for her daughter, who was playing (phonetic spellings) “Marleen [sic] Dietrick [sic] in a play.” I asked what play, assuming for some reason it was a school play. It turned out to be an adult play, but the 50+ lady was flattered I thought her daughter was a child and not a grown woman, which she was, the latter.

…

In the 1983 documentary Marlene, wherein the then-apartment-bound 80-something Miss Dietrich famously never allows herself to be shown, only heard, director Maximilian Schell asks the great film legend’s trusted gay valet, Bernard, a question:

SCHELL: Is she lonely?

BERNARD: I think so, I think we all get lonely somet-…

SCHELL (interrupting): But I mean is she a lonely person?

BERNARD (after pausing to think): Mm… Yes.

…

According to her daughter’s book, Marlene did not like her documentarian or his pretentious attitude, and no matter what he said to her after a certain point during the filming, she would respond, “You’re much too clever for me.” That is a great shutter-upper. He edited it all out to make them both sound better, as people.

…

According to her daughter she was drunk during most of the taping of her voice for the documentary. The best scene in the movie is when Schell asks Dietrich what her favorite Dietrich album is. She becomes emotional as she describes Marlene Singt Berlin, and sings snippets from the songs from memory as the visual we see is aerial footage of miles and miles of bombed-out Berlin in the last days of WWII.

She doesn’t know ahead of time, of course, what will be shown along with her voice, but she ends up in tears as she sings the songs.

I am disturbed by things with “Part 1” in their title that were never followed by a Part 2.

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