Brooke Berman's Blog, page 5

No Place Like Home

I just saw my galley for the first time yesterday. I used to see galleys all the time when I worked at Paper and was allowed to rifle through discarded review copies. But this was different, this one had my name on it. And a book, I am learning, brings a whole series of thrills that are totally different than the thrill of writing a play. A play is ephemeral and communal. This book is an object, a thing. And it keeps existing, in its "thingness". Unlike a play which will close and be...

Charming cottage for rent

Found accidentally (I guess that's why they call it "viral") on Craigs List. This reminds me of a great many of the apartments I looked at in New York City over my 22 years of tenancy.

See book for more.
In the meantime, watch this crazy video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1JbW5...

Splitting the Bills

Shit. This would have saved me so much agony all those roommate years:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#...

LearnVest is advocating some neato bill-splitting application to help roommates work out their monthly bill-paying. In the past, with roommates, I've done everything from split the bills inequally ("You pay more, and I'll clean." I was not one cleaning.) to scheduling bill-paying sessions at luxurious cafes so that we'd be soothed and fed while writing checks....

Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project

I've just started reading Gretchen Rubin's THE HAPPINESS PROJECT – and you should too – and I'm struck by something in the first few pages. Gretchen describes the context for writing her book, the growing feeling of "Is this it?" that plagues so many people in their 40's who seem to have "landed" – she references the Talking Heads song in which David Byrne exclaims "This is not my beautiful house!"

I don't relate.

Because here's the thing. Some of us, many of us...

"Did you sublet an apartment in 2002?"

Last week, I took a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah, to workshop my play Out of the Water. The play had been discovered by the resident literary manager/director of the New Play Initiative at The Pioneer Theater. She'd found the play, randomly, reading scripts at New Dramatists. And she called or emailed me last summer as Gordon and I were driving across the US.

"That's so funny," I remember saying, "Because we're driving through Utah right now!" (Of course we were in Southern Utah, St. Ge...

brookeberman.net

I have launched my first website! Designed by the very talented Ethan Crenson. Let me know what you think.

www.brookeberman.net

"Manhattan is the New Brooklyn"

Today's New York Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/rea...

If Manhattan is the new Brooklyn, I say the East Side of LA is the new East Village. Or at least, West Chelsea.

The Brewery

In LA, we live here:

http://www.thebrewery.net/

An artists colony off Main Street, on the Eastern edge of downtown. It's perfect for a transplanted New Yorker (and her Queens-loving fiancee); we can feel URBAN (which I'm told, in Industry-speak means "Black") while still enjoying the perks of Southern California, which means, we sit outside at night, in the makeshift backyard, listening to our neighbor's running water sculpture and watching the moon and stars (and the occassional feral cat).

S...

LACityMom

check out my sweet friend lee rose emery and her mom-centric tips -

http://lacitymom.wordpress.com/

A Day At Home

Lately, when people ask me, "Do you have a place to live?" ... it's like, what? I think they think they're being cute. I think they think they saw "Hunting and Gathering" and read the Times article, or maybe the Time Out piece, and maybe even they think that my list of apartments represents some kind of pathology. I don't know. But give it up, People. The joke is tired.

Today, I am taking a day off from the world, staying at home, in one of my homes, writing. And right now, as I type this, l...