True confession--not pretty--but true. I was relieved to read the New Yorker review of Crimes of the Heart where the reviewer spent the first seven hundred words basically trashing Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for that play back in 1981. Why? Not because of schadenfreude, but simple reassurance--if a Pulitzer Prize- winning play can get so thoroughly criticized and its playwright so denigrated in the pages of the all-important New Yorker, that means if I and my little first play got trashed in the Detroit Free Press that it's all part of the biz.

And now, thank you, I will go train to be a genetics counselor, so that I can earn real money and see people all day and not be stuck in this little teapot of writing where tempests arise regularly.