With 4 days to go before my 70th birthday, I have never been so happily busy in my life: my 18th Spring Semester has begun at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York; I’m working on rewrites of last year’s opera, The Secret Garden, and a musical, Rex & Lilli, with another opera, The Sphinx in Love, in view; one of last year’s new plays, Rex & Rex, is due for a reading at the New Jersey Rep; I’m about to begin rehearsals on Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven, a new play for the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice, and preparing for the Woodstock Players’ end-of-summer production of Nero at the Movies, another new play. I have voluminous, hugely enjoyable duties at the small mainly-fiction-and-poetry-publishing imprint I help to run. Roll on the Radio, my weekly radio show sponsored by rollmagazine.com, thrives (thank heavens I have a more-than-capable co-host, Phillip X Levine), on WHVW: listen in on whvw.com at 5:00 every Saturday. Meanwhile my new novel, Who Was That Lady?, is about to come out; and the British director Nick Renton has completed a screenplay of Justice, the novel that appeared last year in the US and the UK. We both hope Justice will now find a home on the screen.
And this summer I’m embarking on a round-America 70th-year-defying bike ride between May 15 and July 14 – we’re calling it Bike Odyssey 2014 – with my brother-in-law, Joe Lambe, both of us Harley-borne: Woodstock to San Diego, then up the Pacific Highway and eastward home again across the continent. On July 15 I start teaching again, at BC’s summer school, and rehearsing Beethoven and Nero. The bike odyssey – it’ll be a rest.
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