You probably don’t remember Damn Yankees, the 1957 musical by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, based on a novel by Douglas Wallop, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954). The Yankees baseball team had enjoyed such a legendary successful series of series that it was easy to believe that they had made a pact with the devil to guarantee their continuing supremacy. (The story was a variation on the Faust tale, of course.)

I thought of it/them this past week when the Yankees took our beloved Blue Jays in a sweep - three days of definitive victories. This, after a dazzling season, so far, for the Jays. The Yankees have been way behind, not likely to place in contention for top of their league, not even for a Wild Card placement - and I don’t know what that means. (Perhaps one of you will tell me.) After the trading and realignment of the teams, I understood that the Yankees had bid for and brought in a number of very young rookies, including pitchers, and they were using them and things started to happen, and that’s when I thought of Damn Yankees as they seem to be coming up. I must say, the thought of a bargain with the Devil intrigues me.

I wrote a comedy years ago about a fat woman who bargains with the Devil to be thin. This was long before the movie Shallow Hal, also about a fat woman, which was not Satanic but simply fantasy. Both plays are about perception, not obesity. A theatre in Iowa liked an earlier work of mine (Mark in 1973), that is, the artistic director liked it, and my fat play, too and produced it (winter, 1975, I think). It was the second biggest hit they had ever enjoyed. That wasn’t hard to understand because everyone I ever met in Iowa was fat. Then I was granted a reading by a Toronto theatre but received no nibbles.. That’s when I discovered that actors can make or break a reading, depending on whether or not they liked you. Next, a producer optioned the play but couldn’t raise enough money to put it on. Somewhere along the way, I rewrote it, and then I wrote it as a movie, and then I sort of left it in a file drawer. The Canadian playwright John Murrell once said, “You don’t finish a play; you abandon it.” Right on.

If I told the stories of all my fish that got away, you would wonder why I am not bitter or hopeless or resigned. Well, I’ve said before that failure goes to my head. It’s like waving a red flag at a bull. I stamp my feet and snort and attack again, and again

And maybe that philosophy will help the Blue Jays, too, because as I write this, they are losing to the Red Sox.

Ai me.

A definitive loss.

Ah, the wonders of computers and the possibilities made available for us through technology! I just listened to FDR’s infamy speech.

FDR was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States during World War Two, which began for the U.S. with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. On December 8, the President spoke, describing the events of the day before as acts that would forever be remembered in infamy and asking his government for a declaration of war.

Imagine! Who could have predicted on that sad, angry, apprehensive Monday that 65 years later I would hear the voice and the applause and see the man who many have called the greatest president the United States has ever had, next to Lincoln. I didn’t make that up; I read that in the copy surrounding the material I was researching.

The research is part of my continuous digging for information and insights into the screenplay I am working on. Earlier I found, printed and read Roosevelt’s declaration of war, ratified by the houses, at 3 p.m. on December 11. I had to get the chronology right, though, for the sake of my scene order, so I went back to look again, and that’s when I heard the famous voice. You won’t hear it in the movie, though (if and when it is produced), because my characters in Berlin who gathered around a radio to listen, got static.

Verisimilitude? Over-rated.