Dedication

The Great Plotnik's two friends, Doug and Dave, have finished their epic musical "The Perfect Pitch." "Oh, sure," you say. "No, really," they say.

It's time to sum up. Dave wrote a really beautiful dedication to his stepson Jasper Mountain, whose spirit has been driving Dave to finish this monumental project. Doug had to write something too. Here is his working draft:

Imagine Vin Scully reading this:

"Well, hi everybody! I’m Doug. Dave and I wrote The Perfect Pitch. First we wrote the songs and then we wrote the show. A lot of those songs are still in the show but we have rewritten the story a thousand times. As playwrights, we are great songwriters.

"When Dave comes into your life it’s not like any other job. There is no standing around the water cooler. Working with Dave is a breath of fresh air, followed by a tsunami. Then you get ten seconds more fresh air but that ends because Dave wants to re-do the tsunami.

"Not long after we started writing The Perfect Pitch, in the early 1980s, we took on new names. Dave became Blurt. I became Mull. Mull discovered Blurt had only two speeds: Nonstop and Right Now. Not surprisingly, Blurt did not have a wife. He liked to call our house at 3am or 7am or at dinner time or when the baby was in the bath, with several INCREDIBLE new ideas.

"I had a wife and I still have the same wife, because I paid attention when she told me if I answered that freaking phone one more time I would be Mulling my sorry ass out on Echo Park Avenue.

"In many ways, Blurt and Mull are the perfect fit. I know songs and Dave knows grooves. In fact, I gave Blurt his other name: WOG (Wave of Groove). WOG would play me one of his intoxicating funkified musical tracks and after a short mull I’d have melody and lyrics. A little refining from both of us: done. The songs were easy. The story was harder.

"Computers were just starting to happen. We heard about this new thing called Word Processing. We found a guy in a grungy Hollywood apartment that stank of broccoli. He had a first generation Xerox Word Processor. I sat in the stink one Saturday typing out the first draft of the script to The Perfect Pitch. When I was finished I turned off the machine, called WOG and told him “We’re done!” Nobody mentioned anything to me about the SAVE button.

"One afternoon we decided we needed to record baseball crowd noise so we took an old cassette recorder to Dodger Stadium during a Dodgers-Phillies playoff game. We taped 55,000 people singing the National Anthem. That sound effect is still in the play and every time I hear it I get Bud Bumps.

"I get more Bud Bumps when I hear my other favorite sound effect in the play: a baby crying. That’s because it’s my daughter Bronnie. She was born as we were writing the show. We taped her at three weeks old. She’s in graduate school now but she’s still three weeks old all through the play.

"Our Commisioner’s name is Bud. We fought a lot about him. Bud’s name was originally God One, but we were working with several born-again Christians in those days and they convinced us we couldn’t call him God or God One because it would make them uncomfortable.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you have made him into an incompetent boob,” they said.

“So if we turn him into an Old Testament bully who has temper tantrums and smites and destroys shit, you’ll be all right with it?”

“Sure,” they all said. “Smiting, we get.”

"But two Jews can’t just … do that. We had to give our Commissioner a lovable name. So today we’ve got Bud, who has become less like Yahweh and more like a rather kindly administrator at the National Endowment of the Arts. He sits in his office on the planet Budstock, running the Cosmos, handing out grants to all his planets, rocks, asteroids and the occasional meteor. Nobody ever sees Bud, but everybody knows he’s there because they can hear music from Bud’s transistor radio slipping out from under his office door.

"This, in a nutshell, is the definition of Judaism: 'He Might or Might Not Be In There, but You Have to Admit That Music is Really Catchy.'

"Blurt moved to Aspen and started a new life with his wife Patti and his beautiful stepson Jasper Mountain. Jas was quite a kid. I met him climbing in an avocado tree in Hollywood. The barely dormant yenta in me immediately made a future match between Jas and Bronnie. But life can toss you curveball after curveball. You swing and swing but can only foul them off for so long. Eventually, Jas came up against one he couldn’t handle.

"Years passed. My wife and I moved to San Francisco and I started a new life myself. More years passed. Then Dave discovered the old tapes of The Perfect Pitch. He called me from Aspen. I asked my wife: “What would you think if I started working with Dave again on The Perf…”

“Hold on,” she said. “How long?”

“Oh, you know. A month, a few months, tops. Six?”

“That means four years,” she said. “Just keep your door closed and he still can’t call the house.”

"It’s four years later. Dave picked up another new name: Hamster. He has been chained to the wheel of The Perfect Pitch for all that time. Our work schedules are somewhat different. The Hamster calls me Nail a Day Doug, as in the carpenter comes into your house, bangs in one nail, yawns, looks at his watch and says “OK, see ya tomorrow.”

"If there is one lesson to impart here, it is this: Don’t ever try to write a play by e-mail. The Hamster doesn’t always think before he hits SEND. Nail a Day Doug flies off the handle when he gets one of those messages, and bangs a few more nails into a nasty REPLY. Hamster calls me a name. SEND. I insult his mother. BANG. It does downhill from there.

"Then we turn off the email and fly into the same room in the same city – and magic happens. There’s nothing better. That’s the crazy thing.

"So we’re done. The Perfect Pitch is not perfect. But the world is not perfect either. There are Barry Shallows everywhere we look. It’s a world of twisted dimwits, but at least we know why now: they’re all UnWelcomed Babies.

"Technology has advanced but people still lie. Our country is fat but thinks it’s starving. My kids live in a different world than we did, but they still want the same thing as everyone else wants, always did want and always will want: Food. Water. Baseball. And good music. Not noise. Music of the Hemispheres. Music to last a thousand years.

"Hamster, this Bud’s for you: (CLINK)