May 20, 2025

The Month Without

Hello there.

First off, apologies that this has taken so long. Spring has never been my favorite time of year, there’s too much transition of the saying goodbye, taking off into the yonder variety, and this spring has been no less brutal than ones I’ve experienced in the past. Except, you know, I’m genuinely terrified for my life, and the lives of the people I love, the communities we’ve built (such as they are), and the future that I still believe is possible, even as I remain here, clearing these ruins and trying to turn them into foundations (or am I just stuck and refusing to admit it?)

But that’s no excuse for not writing. Especially when this is the only way that some of you know I’m still kicking out here.

So what have I been up to since the last time?

Well, I had a truly lovely Easter. THE LAST UNICORN readers’ theater event happened on a beautiful Sunday under the trees of Huntington Park. I played Schmendrick, and many of my oldest and dearest friends in the Bay Area assembled to eat food and laugh and sing (yes there were songs) and I even gave out prizes. When I strolled home from the shadow of Grace Cathedral in the late afternoon, mildly buzzed and gently sunburned, I felt, briefly a kind of present that could only be a present. In the evening, as I relaxed in my favorite pajamas with a glass of wine, my favorite person texted from New York to remind me to keep up traditions. I put on A ROOM WITH A VIEW, and finished a perfect Sunday.

It had actually been a really nice weekend. I had spent the previous evening at a going away party in the outer Sunset where I drank too much and raided a massive book collection for rare treasures, in a house that was soon to be gutted of its memories and sold to someone who would fill it with new ones. A treasure from another era of San Francisco, as many of the older houses in the Sunset and Richmond feel, the party itself felt like some kind of relic, the echoes of laughter from the open front door following me all the way to the train stop, reminding me of the kind of Saturday night I used to take for granted. A few days later the friend who was leaving paid me one more visit before he took off for a summer of adventures, but when I left him on the street outside my apartment, the sun was shining, and the breeze was making the trees sing, so my heart felt light.

FRANKENSTEIN encored at SF Ballet, and I managed to get in numerous friends using the amazing staff rush program. A masterpiece that I grew to love with each subsequent viewing, I still had to pace myself, watching different segments on different days, so as to manage the feelings triggered each time I remembered that I’d only finally read the book in October of 2020, when I, like Shelley herself, had been confined indoors and wondered if the world was coming to an end. Sitting in the empty press room, I listened over and over to the behind the scenes promotional video which was looped there, featuring SF Ballet dancer Wei Wang talking about the creature he has played all season: “He’s trying to find answers for himself,” he explained, over footage of the monster murdering a child. “He’s trying to find why he was left behind, why he was abandoned by his creator.”

I pitched- and published- a story about writing about Liz Callaway, and wrote my first “professional” piece about a Sondheim production, continuing my streak of contributing to the Petaluma Argus Courier. I covered a queer photography exhibit too, where the photographer explained that she was challenging the queer audience to consider what it would take to go back into the closet, and the straight audience to consider who they’d be willing to protect… and hide. I posted about the relevance of it on Facebook, and texted it directly to a trans friend who took her new girlfriend to see it.

My neighbor across the hallway died, either of an overdose or kidney failure as a result of not going to dialysis, probably because he was on drugs. Either way, I came home to paramedics and stretchers, and a smell that lingered for days, while some in my building celebrated (he was sort of the local menace) and others quietly wished his spirit the peace he couldn’t find in life. Plus, there but for the grace of God go I.

I met my favorite ex for beer at Zeitgeist, one of San Francisco’s most resilient fossils. I went drinking with my dive bar duo. I had dinners with various friends and various spouses and children of friends, and always I was asked what I’m working on.

“Nothing, really. An adaptation of THE TEMPEST to be performed in Montara in October. An adaptation of SATYRICON to be performed next spring. A book of poetry, sometimes, when I’m lying to myself that I’m ever going to actually sit down and sort through all of my poems. An article about a famous rock star, for the paper.”

But no original plays, novels, or short stories, and nothing for this Substack. I just can’t seem to focus. I can’t seem to form my feelings into coherent thoughts or my thoughts into the kind of thinking I believe the world needs right now. With everything that’s happening, no story I have to tell feels like it’s serious enough, or inspiring enough, or even just funny enough to offer some kind of respite to my readers. The things I have to celebrate feel small, inconsequential, when compared to all the things I have to fear. Their relevance seems to evaporate in the face of whatever new chaos is coming tomorrow. Even when a student I monologue coached won Oustanding Actor at the first ever Sara Bareillis Awards recognizing local high school musical theater productions, I found myself on the phone with his mother, catastrophizing he won’t have a world to be talented in.

Mary Shelley’s novel was a Divine Gift, if one believes in such things as Muses and/or the human psyche’s remarkable ability to cough up a hairball of brilliance after months of seemingly fruitless self-examination and heartbreak… but my Frankenstein Season feels like the best it can do is manifest an invitation to Victor and Elizabeth’s wedding, where everyone dies. I get why you’d skip it, but please still RSVP.

“We’re supposed to be reflecting about this, and talking about it, what we feel and see- what it means to be a human right now,” my sister says to me on the phone, when I tell her that I’ve let more than a month slip by without an entry. “Remember, Stuart, the opposite of war isn’t peace-“

“It's creation,” I finish with her, the most banal platitude of my generation’s protest musical failing to inspire much more than some weak, nostalgic laughter.

But then earlier, on the phone with my aunt, all the way from her tiny town in the Midwest where there are no sidewalks, just grassy shoulders along quiet roads:

“If I made a sign to protest, what would it say? I can think of a hundred things to write on it.”

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Hello!

Thank you for reading!

So, in a moment of just, fuck it, I'll give it a try, I am finally doing that thing people keep saying I should do and giving you the chance to support my writing.

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Be well. Reach out. You are a light.

Stuart