I’m happy to report that I’ve finished the second draft of my first play, “The Last Day At Maple View Farm.” I wrote half a play more than a decade ago, it was performed at a new playwright’s workshop in Soho, but I never finished it or tried writing another one. A couple of months ago I had lunch with David Snider, the new director of Hubbard Hall, the beautiful old arts and education center in my town – an old partially restored Opera House is it’s centerpiece, part of a campus of old restored buildings. I teach my short story class there.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I told David about this idea I had for a play about the last day of a dairy farm, I’ve taken a lot of photos of dying dairy farms, and the plight of these small family farms has touched me deeply. I have a lot of friends who are farmers, we seem to get each other, which is strange in some ways, not in others. Farmers are seeing their lives and farms discarded all the time, they have been forgotten by much of the world, especially the politicians, the economists and people who forget where their food comes from. They are the world’s greatest animal lovers, and I have come to love and respect many of those I have met.

Moss does not grow anywhere on David, the next thing I knew I was submitting a short outline to him, maybe eight or nine pages of dialogue. He said Hubbard Hall was doing a January festival for mid-winter. He loved my idea, would I mind expanding it to perhaps 40 or more pages? I agreed, it was, of course, harder than I thought and I finished it yesterday and showed it to two farmer friends including Carol Gully, who I met in cardiac rehab, she runs a small dairy farm with her husband Ed. Carol read it and correct some phrasing to make it authentic. She said she and her husband Ed both cried when they read parts of it, I loved that, although I think she was taken aback by my rejoicing over her crying.

Carol is the real deal, if she loved my play and her husband did, this is as good a compliment as I might get. So it’s in David’s hands now, if he likes it and schedules it I will see my first play (it is very short, no more than 10 or 15 minutes) performed on the wonderful old stage in Hubbard Hall. I love trying new things, stretching myself. I’ll keep you posted on the life and fate of this new work, I love the idea of adding “playwright” to my creative credits. Maria read it as well, she cried a bit and said it was “horrible,” but she said she didn’t mean it was awful, just very sad in parts. She actually cried a lot, so much that I added a new ending so that it would retain it’s power but end more hopefully perhaps. I loved writing it.