Someone gave me an amazing early birthday present on Sunday: two CD-Rs, onto which he’d burned a total of 23 cast albums from his collection that he thought I’d like or in which I’d expressed interest. They are:

The Baker’s Wife
Bat Boy
Candide
Carrie (a bootleg)
Chess
Do I Hear a Waltz?
Dreamgirls
Floyd Collins
The Golden Apple
Grand Hotel
The Grass Harp
Hello Again
In Trousers
The Last Five Years
Merrily We Roll Along
The Most Happy Fella (1992)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Nick & Nora
Pacific Overtures
Passion
She Loves Me
Violet
The Wild Party (Lippa version)

Plus three miscellaneous songs.

I’m in clover. Not only does this almost double the number of cast albums I have, but now I’ve got hours and hours of listening pleasure ahead of me. Part of me just wants to listen to everything as soon as I can; the other part of me wants to take my sweet time and listen to the albums little by little over the next couple of months.

At any rate, it’s one of the best presents an aspiring theater queen could ask for. Thank you again, Matt!

I wonder if there’s a group noun for cast albums. A chorus of cast albums? A gershwin of cast albums? A garland of cast albums? A cacophony of cast albums? A blare of cast albums? A sibilance of cast albums?

Any other ideas?

The concert on Saturday night went great. I don’t know if any of my readers were there, but my family came, and they loved it. According to my brother, my aunt (who is the most religious among us) even sang along with the Christmas carols. I was really thankful that my parents came, and their reaction showed me how far things have come. Four years ago, they were devastated by the news that I was gay; this weekend, they voluntarily came to see me sing with a gay men’s chorus. Way to go, Mom and Dad.

Lately I’ve been trying to fine-tune my life goals. I’d been thinking about library school, but now I’ve been leaning strongly against it. My dream is not to be a law librarian; the point of library school was only suuposed to be to get me a more palatable job to support my true goals. But spending time and money on a degree that I don’t really want in and of itself feels like a big waste. What I want to do is write. And it struck me last week that if I keep putting off writing, it’s never going to get done. I keep forgetting, or avoiding, that simple truth. Because you know what? It’s so much easier to have the goal and say I’m going to do something about it than to actually do something about it.

My biggest passion is writing. One of my other big passions is theater. So I’d love to either write theater or write about theater; I’d love to either write plays or musicals or become a theater critic. (That’s in addition to about a hundred other things that I’ve either blogged or thought about over the last few years.) They say that who your idols are can tell you a lot about yourself, and two of my current idols are Stephen Sondheim and Frank Rich. I’d love to do what either of them do, or have done. I recent finished Frank Rich’s wonderful memoir, Ghost Light, and I’m currently reading Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life, which I’m greatly enjoying (even though I hear there are better books on Sondheim’s shows). I’m also slowly working my way through the albums of the original Sondheim shows I’ve never heard, which is almost half of them.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to have to give up my goal of becoming famous before the age of 30, since I have only 12 days left in which to do that.

Sigh.

I wonder if any of my readers can answer a question for me. How do I contact a particular writer, screenwriter, playwright, etc.? Do I send a letter care of the publisher? If so, does it have to be the most recent publisher, or can it be any publisher that has published that person’s work? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.