I went to a Creator’s Meeting last night, given (a real gift!) by the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada (PGC) for members who are either directors or playwrights (sometimes both), ten of each, attendance determined on a first-signup - first accepted basis. I was the first to sign up, so eager, and I went to the last ones too, for designers and playwrights and before that for directors and playwrights. In the meet-and-mingle session we had to ask why we were there.

My answer is easy: because my contemporaries are dead. Or retired or gaga. I’m still here and I want to meet the youngsters 20, 30, 40 years younger than I, who are coming along and find out what they are doing. There’s more theatre in Toronto than there used to be and more venues and opportunities and more variety, so these people are getting produced, reaching an audience, broader and more varied than it was, too. They’re working!

At the other end of the spectrum, I attended a salon conducted by CSARN (Canadian Senior Artists’ Resources Network) -

- and then I got cut off. It’s the end of the day now and the battery is feeing better than I am. So, about this salon: contemporaries or almost, much closer to my age, anyway, and delightful people - senior artists, retired- and some of them even knew who I was, that is, who I used to be.

We’ll see what happens next.

I don’t think I’ve told you this. James Thurber again, remember him? Younger, non-readers may know the name of his creation, Walter Mitty. The New Yorker published a short story (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) in March, 1939, that was based on the eponymous character. It has twice been made into a film, with Mitty played by Danny Kaye (1911-1987) and more recently by Ben Stiller. The name and its story have become a contemporary Aesop Fable. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs".

That’s not what I want to write about. I’m thinking of a far less well-known story of Thurber’s about a man whose wife began correcting his stories/tales/anecdotes - in the company of others, at parties! (Very humiliating.)

“No dear, it was a Thursday…it wasn’t raining, it was a sunny day…she wasn’t naked, she was wearing a bikini…he shouted, he didn’t sing..” And so on.

So he began to narrate his dreams because she wasn’t there, ,she hadn’t heard them. But he ran out of dreams. And when he began to tell old dreams, she was right in there:

“it wasn’t a pink cloud. You said it was a blue one….”

See, that might happen to me. Maybe it already has. I’ll start repeating myself and you will correct me. I have a horror of repeating myself. On the other hand, it will mean that you read something of mine before. That’s a comforting thought.

It’s the beginning of immortality