The guy needed those glasses. And how. I had never seen or heard of a mime with glasses, but it soon became obvious that this one was not only a fine placer of gesture, but he could very clearly see his way to the comedy of a hilarious sketch “The Blind Knifethrower.” And there was something akin to blind love which drove his trust of me as I tried to figure out what in the hell I was doing with the “Royal Lichtenstein Circus” way back in June of 1972.  That love was muscular and patient enough to teach me to juggle and figure out the staging of narrated mime fables.

In a later season, after his place was taken by other clowns, jugglers and mimes, we had dinner with his family when the show came to their town. Aha! The love was no accident: he had learned from a family that worked at it even when they couldn’t see clearly what their labors achieved.

Now, an award-winning playwright, my old juggling teacher has written about his family: his parents, his older brother and himself.  The play centers on the time he spent with his dying parents, especially his live-in months with that colorful mother who cooked our meal long ago in Syracuse, New York. Reading the script, in between my out loud bursts of uncontrollable laughter and sobbing, I could tell just how keen my friend’s vision has become. How well he sees his family, himself, the brutal deliberations and happenstances of love as it intersects our similar wanderings in divinity. Selfishly, I am overwhelmed at how deftly he sees into me: that vision so essential to any great writer fashioning public images to identify and compel the untold individuals encountering such art.

A few nights ago another friend, a young theater intern, saw at the Seattle Rep what my playwright friend fashioned from his own vision of his family. Unaware of my connection to the playwright, she wrote immediately to her grandfather and mother: “I have never left the theatre wanting to tell the people in my life that I love them more than I did tonight.” Her grandfather, another friend of mine seasoned by over half a century of performing, directing and teaching in theatre, gave me a copy of that love note. I sent it to my playwright friend. He graciously sent a loving reply to be forwarded to her and an attached copy of the play which I read last night. You are reading my governing—heartfelt—reaction.

Oh, yes!   That playwright is Bill Cain and his downright sacred new work for the theater is How To Write a New Book For the Bible.  Find it. And if you manage to encounter it onstage somewhere before I do, I am already insanely jealous.