This week has been so busy. Since Saturday, almost no time.

– Saturday’s Staged Reading at WT went great. Very well received, a nice house, about 65 people – less than the first reading, but we expected that. Not nearly the dropoff I was afraid of, which is a good sign!

– Held auditions for our first show, ADDITIONAL PARTICULARS. Very, very exciting. A bunch of great actors showed up, gave me a ton of good choices – it’s always very nice when casting a show really comes down to being able to match type, chemistry, workability and all of the factors you look for! (As opposed to going “well, I only had one guy show up who was remotely right, I guess we’d better use him.”, which was a long way from what happened for this show!

– Movie night with the kids and Jeanne. Anyone see Zathura? Fun kids movie. Some scripty and director-ey things that bugged me, but I wasn’t really the target demographic.

– Christine loaned me Stephen King’s new book, CELL and I’ve been reading it before I go to sleep the last few nights. I may be up late with it tonight, because it’s starting to get interesting!

– I had this amazing, weird thing happen on Sunday. I was recycling the soda and beer cans and bottles at the local supermarket (Polly’s). As you go thru the double doors and enter the “vestibule”, between the outside and the actual store, they have a bank of ‘do-it-yourself’ recycle machines; you stand there with your cart of empties and feed them into the appropriate slot on the machine. When you’re done, it gives you a receipt and you get your money from a cashier inside. It’s the “This is kind of a hassle for $6.30, but it’s probably a good idea” recycling routine.

So, I’m standing with a few other people in this vestibule, feeding Killian’s bottles and pop cans into the machine (it had been too long since I’d done it, I had a whole cartful from the garage!). As I’m nearing completion, a clean-cut guy who looked to be in his mid-forties wheeled his cart up to the machine next to mine and began his recycling routine. We worked alongside each other for a 3 or 4 minutes, and then I finished and hit the button to get my receipt.

As I took the printout, I glanced at the guy next to me, and he’s weeping.

Tears are openly running down his face. I watch him for a second and he’s clearly in another world – not in a psycho way, just lost deep, deep in thought. Or memory. All the while, he’s methodically feeding his cans into the machine, and just weeping.

I gently said “Excuse me?” and I saw his focus shift, his eyes catch up with where he was, and he looked at me as if to say “Did you say something?”

“Are you okay?” I asked, quietly so it was just between the two of us.

He seemed to realize, then, that he’d been crying. He sort of almost-smiled and said quietly “Yeah, yeah I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay”, I said, and after a beat I started to go. And then, and this is what really got me, he said “Thanks a lot for asking.”

And it wasn’t just what he said, but how he said it. As though…as though no one had asked him that in a while. Or, maybe that’s not it. As though having it asked of him was confirming something about people, or society, or humanity. I don’t know. He was so grateful as he said it. We shared a look, a brief moment, and a nod. Then he turned and continued his task and I pushed my cart back to the cart corral, and went inside to cash in my receipt.

When I came out and walked thru the vestibule he was gone.

I can’t get that moment out of my head.

“Thanks a lot for asking.”