Auditions for my play, The Gringo Who Stole Christmas

DKAT Productions, Inc. will be holding auditions for the musical comedy I wrote, THE GRINGO WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS, to be performed at Proctors' GE Theatre in December. We are looking for Hispanic and non-Hispanic performers to fill several roles. There are 4 male roles available ranging in age from 20 to 50 years of age, and 3 female roles in the same age range. We will be casting both principal cast and ensemble roles. Auditions will be held on Sunday, September 14th and Wednesday, September 17th starting at 7:00 PM in the downstairs education space at Proctors Theater (stairs by the box office). Performances will be held on December 12-14 and 19-21, 2014 at Proctors Theater in the G.E. Theater. You will be asked to sing 16-32 bars of a song of your choice (standard musical theater or contemporary pop) and you will be asked to do a cold reading of a monologue. If you have any additional questions please feel free to contact us at dkatproductions@yahoo.com.

My Fifty-Second Year

My wife urges me to play “52” on the lottery. Because this is your lucky year, she says. Your first novel is being published. Your musical comedy,The Gringo Who Stole Christmas, will be performed at Proctors Theatre in December. Your blog appears twice a week on the Times UnionCommunity Blog site. You fixed the snow blower all by yourself, and kept the driveway clear without paying someone else to do it.

Not so fast, I counter. Who says anyone will buy my book beyond my family and friends? So far Amazon ranks it 200,000 among books in terms of sales. The ranking is the same as the population ofAkron, Ohio. The play is $70,000 and nearly a year away from a performance. And the Times Union, while widely read in the capital region, is surely noNew York Times.

You are your worst enemy, she says. You will sabotage the good things. I search her voice for irony. Finding none, I remind her I’m on the bottom rung of a very tall ladder. I picture gazing up at the well-worn soles of thousands of respected authors before me. Ernst Hemingway. Philip Roth. Lorrie Moore. Tennessee Williams. Plenty of writers like me have clasped the first rung and climbed no higher. Plenty of writers like me have clung to the first rung and fallen off.

My wife insists I shoot the lock off my wallet and play the lottery when the jackpot hits $52 million. But the publisher of my novel is small, I counter. I am like a vacuum cleaner salesman, going door-to-door to book stores to get them to stock my book. I remind her the play I wrote needs money and actors. My Times Unionblog appears in the Lifestyles category, near gardening tips and dating adventures, an uncertain platform for an author’s literary debut.

My wife urges me to look at the greater fabric of my life. How the first reviews of my novel on Amazon are all positive. How I wrote my new comedic musical in collaboration with Alex Torres, a well-known known musician and composer, and a reputable director and producer have climbed aboard – a step up from my last play, performed for my daughter’s sixth grade class. How auditions are being held this week to pick a cast. How the Times Union has tripled the number of people who see my posts compared to when I used Blogger.

I remind her that my book is merely one of hundreds of thousands of new books hitting the market each year. A lot of perfectly good books have fallen to the wayside. Gone up in smoke. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I say, purposely using clichés to demean my profession.

My wife is fed up. Take out the garbage, she suggests. Do something useful instead of wallowing in self-pity. I grow defensive but hold back. Fortunately, it’s morning, and I feel positive about life. Then, like clockwork, around 11:30 a.m. the bottom drops out. By mid-afternoon I’m inconsolable. Everything turns dark. I wrack my brain for answers. Low blood sugar? Did my body digest that donut too fast? By mid-afternoon I am performing mental self-torture. My writing sucks. I have no new ideas. I’m not going anywhere. My life is a waste.

Then my brother emails me that he read my book, which he pre-ordered. He said he laughed out loud on the airplane. His wife laughed out loud at the dentist’s office. I feel better. After all, my novel is meant to be funny. I feel like jumping up and down and celebrating. I’ll hang on another day. Or at least a few more hours. I check my wallet and spy a wad of dollars. Maybe they add up to $52. Maybe there’s a lottery ticket out there with my number on it. Perhaps the jackpot’s closing in on $52 million.

Hey, you never know.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March and is available for purchase now on Amazon. His author events this spring are in Saratoga, Brooklyn, and Long Island. 

Debunking the Reality of My Fiction

My new novel is the opposite
in many respects of my life
on which it's partly based

As my novel The Opposite of Everything marches toward publication – it hits bookstores on March 11, and became available to Kindle users this week — I’d like to get a couple things off my chest.

I never wore a nose ring or pierced my skin for decorative purposes.

I never went Gothic.

My father never pushed me off a bridge, even accidentally.

My mother does not speak in a Yiddish accent and embraces my wife’s Hispanic culture.

My wife and I never tried to conceive a baby at my father’s home with his help.

My father supported me during my health and marital problems, and showed up for my police showdown with my first wife – the opposite, in some ways, of how the father character is depicted in my novel.

At my second wedding, I never canceled the caterers, never corralled guests to help cook, and never replaced the priest with Buddhist monks.

I hate heavy metal music.

I could go on with this list for a long time. Because it turns out that my novel, The Opposite of Everything, is the opposite in many respects of my life on which it’s partly based.

All fiction writers draw from real-life experiences for material, some more than others. But novelists with a rich past are in a particular bind.  Like me. Back twenty years ago, in one week flat, I learned I had cancer and required surgery to remove my thyroid, lymph nodes, and a sliver of trachea. As all this was happening, my first marriage fell apart.

Writing about one’s own troubles can be overwhelming. You’re forced to revisit all the ways life hurt you and those around you. Lots of writers do it, of course – bookshelves and Amazon are crammed with tear-extracting cancer memoirs. But my own temperament is different. When I first sat down to write, I couldn’t stomach reading back my own words. The words “predictable” and “melodramatic” sprang to mind. Too many sentences sounded sappy. My characters felt like stick figures manufactured to highlight milestones on my journey.

My life felt too hot to handle. So I distanced myself from it. I told the story in third-person. I replaced real names with offbeat ones (“I” became Daniel Plotnick).  I searched for humor in tragedy, stretched truths for dramatic effect, and made characters do crazy things their real-life counterparts would never consider.

In reality, for instance, my first wife had a predictably strong reaction to my diagnosis of cancer. With no treatment on the horizon, she supported me in her own way. One thing she did was buy several pounds of green tea, touting the benefits of anti-oxidants to keep me healthy. For my novel, I amped up her reaction. She shops in a panic at the health food store. Bursts through the door laden with groceries. “Handfuls of dark green leaves. Flax. Wheatgrass. A vial of primrose elixir. Pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, dried pomegranate. The kitchen filled up with the ripe odor of vegetables and nuts and fruit on the verge of turning. Plotnick gazed back down at the crossword puzzle to divert his attention from the hub-bub, but a large Kale leaf now blocked the Across clues.”

In reality, my first wife gained some weight amid our craziness. But for the novel, the wife character gains a lot. As a writer, I upped the ante. Troubled by his wife’s weight gain, Plotnick goes Gothic. In a climactic scene, he walks drunkenly through the door dressed in his black duds and stumbles across her as she binges on premium ice cream.

Of course, I face the danger that readers will see more in my book than actually’s there. Here’s the question that strikes fear in my heart – and in the hearts of all novelists mining their personal past: Nice book, but why did you make me look so bad?

So when the question came to me last year from someone I won’t name, my gut felt sliced open like a watermelon. But I’m just doing my job as a fiction writer, I thought.

So consider this blog post my effort to make a point of clarity. To pre-emptively answer any questions that might come up. Toward that end, I hereby reprint the first paragraph of my Acknowledgment from my novel:

 “This book is a work of fiction, pure and simple. As fiction authors do, I drew for material from my own experience, and went to town with it. My overriding goal was to create a fully realized story, rich with drama, comedy, and a narrative arc. Toward that end, the characters I invented to populate my story are precisely that – invented. Any perceived resemblances to real people are coincidental to my goals as a novelist.”

That said, I will always mine my past for material. Currently working on a second novel, and a musical comedy The Gringo Who Stole Christmas, which will be performed at Proctors in December, I stretch things for impact. I look to situations where comedy reveals painful truths about dying, broken hearts, and busted dreams. I free myself from the shackles of facts. As long as I am able, I’ll write my way out of this pickle I’m in.

David Kalish is the author of the novel, The Opposite of Everything, which will be published in March and is available for purchase now on Kindle.