Horoscopes, the Kleban, Life Lessons

I’m sitting here right now in a kind of startled state of self-reproach. It’s a long story, but it’s kind of a life lesson in listening to your gut, so here goes. First, a little back story: Back in the early to mid-90s, I was enjoying the single most wonderful period of happiness, creativity, productivity and just flat out joy of my entire life before or since. My then-collaborator and I were working on a project we were both crazy in love with, and every week, without fail, we would go out on Tuesday and pick up a copy of the NYPress, a paper neither of us really appreciated the political POV of, but which was an early adopter of David Sedaris and which, every week, featured the Rob Brezhny horoscope.

We used to live in weekly anticipation of that horoscope. Not in a cow-eyed, gullible way so much as in the way in which some people look forward to their first cup of coffee or their first cigarette, or their morning shower or their morning run. It was how we started our week, and it used to amaze and charm and excite us how often Rob’s predictions were right in tune with where we actually were, the obstacles we were facing, the successes we were having. It was a little weekly ritual and when we were in doubt about what course to take, we would listen to Rob. If Rob said, “this is a time to sit back and meditate on challenges, rather than trying to meet them directly,” we wouldn’t even try to fix that creaky scene in the second act until he said, “this is your moment to tackle those problems!” If we’d been in the same time zone, we would have set our watches by Rob’s horoscopes.

My thing with horoscopes is, I think they can be a fun little boost; the advice contained in them is general and so typically optimistic and common sensible that they rarely say anything you didn’t already sort of know intuitively, so I think they can kind of cut through a lot of the mental plaque and help get you to the heart of the matter. You may know perfectly well, deep down inside, where you’re soft, like a woman, that it’s time to quit the job that’s been making you miserable for a year. You’re smart and have skills and you’d probably be okay, and besides, you’re miserable. But sometimes you just stay in denial about it until the day your horoscope says: “April brings a signal from the universe to cut the ties that bind. Leap, and assume the universe will catch you!” And that’s when you know. That’s how you know. And that’s why I like horoscopes. That’s why, in a sense, I might almost say I “believe” in them.

So, recently I happened to start reading my monthly horoscope again, and I couldn’t help take note of the fact that the astrologer I was reading kept emphasizing this amazing, miraculous, joyful productive, several-year long cycle I was entering, and that I hadn’t seen a phase like this since, well, the early-to-mid nineties. And in fact, that is very true. And for the second week of September, she was all about the huge amount of work I would be tackling, which I sort of blew off, because in fact I really didn’t have much work scheduled for that period at all.Then, a couple of weeks ago, I heard that co-worker of mine had been awarded an NEA grant. And I mean, I like this woman, she’s a lovely person and for all I know very talented, but of course my first thought was. “How did so-and-so wind up with an NEA grant?” And of course the answer came back loud and clear: “Well, for starters, I’m guessing she probably APPLIED for one.” Then, on the Saturday before Labor Day, as I was lying in bed half-awake, I had one of those very clear, not-quite-awake moments of “there are all kinds of big money awards out there for musical theater. You need to fill out some applications.” And I knew I had a notebook somewhere that had all the deadline dates written in it, but it was packed away with some old papers.

Or at least, it had been packed away with some old papers until a couple of days before, when just coincidentally I had been looking for something else and left the notebook right on my bedroom dresser. So I checked the list, and of course all of the deadlines had past, except for one. But that was the big one: the Kleban award, which is a $100,000 cash award. Actually, two: one for lyricists and one for librettists. And I recently finished what I believe to be a very good musical theater libretto, for the show that is the subject of this blog. So. The only problem was, the only deadline information I had was “September.” So if was September 1, then I was screwed, since it was already the 5th, but if it was the 30th, then there was every chance I could pull this off. Naturally, I couldn’t get to a computer to check until Sunday afternoon, and when I did it turned out that the deadline was September 15. Oh, and even for a libretto submission, you still had to show all the lyrics. They didn’t need music, but they did to see lyrics.

And I thought to myself, I thought: hmmm. I wonder if there’s some way I could fudge this. It wouldn’t be easy, but I had seven days. Could I write ten to fifteen musical theater lyrics in that amount of time? It would obviously be extremely difficult, and it was a long-shot at best, but, I thought, how could I not at least try? And I decided I would be positive, extremely positive. I would just assume it could be done. I would simply not entertain any thought that it could not be done, because believe it or not, that almost always works for me.

Except that it wasn’t really ten days, because I was traveling most of the day on Monday, and Tuesday through Friday were work days. But I worked where I could find time, and I was actually not doing as badly as you might think, until at 10:30 on Saturday night, the document in which I had been working simply winked out of existence, never to be seen or heard from again. And at that point I was terribly resolute and thought, well, okay. It was probably never meant to be, and it might not have been the best thing to submit a rush job, and hell, as I said elsewhere. It’s not like I still won’t want the hundred grand next year. So I decided not to kill myself over it and just calmly admitted defeat.

Then, today, I happened to be directed to Rob’s website by someone else’s facebook post, and this was my horoscope for last week:

“If you build it, they will probably come. If you just pretend to build it, they may come anyway, and end up sticking around because of your charming attunement to life's deeper rhythms. If, as you build it or pretend to build it, you act manic or send out mixed messages, they may be intrigued and attracted, but they definitely won't come. So my advice, Pisces, is to suppress your mood swings as you at least start pretending to build the thing in earnest.”

And I am here to tell you, if I had seen that sucker a week ago? There is no power on earth that would have prevented me from completing and submitting that script. There’s a story about some turn lady swimmer, I want to say Annette Kellerman, but anyway, she was one of the first people to attempt to swim the English Channel, and she swam it on a very foggy day, and in the end, she didn’t make it. But what’s weird is, she gave up just a few hundred feet from the shore. She said later, if only she had known; if it hadn’t been so foggy, if she had been able to see the shore, there’s no doubt in her mind she would have made it. I believe her.This wasn’t some big catastrophe or anything. The submission year for everything is pretty much over now, and next year is coming up bleeding fast. I’ll have a much better chance at those awards then, and in the meantime, I did some good work and overcame a big hurdle in even starting to work on the score of this show at all (which I’ve been kind of nervous about doing). So it’s all good. But I feel like maybe the Universe was trying to tell me something. I think I need to start listening to my gut again. It’s almost always right, and it was probably right this time. I just let reality get in my way. If I had believed at the outset, however superstitiously, that this was Meant To Be, I would have found a way to make it happen.

Next time I’ll try to remember that.