I’ll take some of that credit

JOSEPH N. BELL

Last Thursday, it hit me that we did some things right in raising our

kid.

I was home alone when he phoned, about 9 o’clock that evening. He

had taken off earlier in the day after spending the night with us and

said he would return late. This has been a frequent pattern since he

hooked up with a writing partner in Orange County and began using his

old bedroom as a bed-and-breakfast place, which is just fine with us

because we get to see more of him that way.

So last Thursday, he called to say that he wouldn’t be home after

all because he had some business in Los Angeles the next morning and

would be spending the night in his apartment there. That seemed to me

to take care of the matter, but he wasn’t quite finished.

“I’ll come by tomorrow to make my bed,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I was running late this morning and didn’t have time to

make it.”

Having lived with the chaos in his room for a dozen adolescent

years -- which we dealt with by not allowing him to export it to

other parts of the house -- I couldn’t quite absorb this new social

awareness.

“Do you have some other reason for coming here tomorrow?” I asked.

“Just to make the bed” he said. “When I left, I thought I’d be

back tonight.”

So I told him we would take care of it this time but not to let it

happen again. I’m not sure he knew I was joking. I didn’t know, then,

that he and his mother had had a policy discussion in which it was

pointed out to him that while we enthusiastically welcomed him as

often as possible, he had to respect the rules that governed our

living space. And one of them was not leaving his bed in a tangle of

sheets and blankets.

I viewed our phone conversation with a special irony because what

Erik didn’t know was that while we were talking about bed-making, I

had open before me on my desk a copy of the Garland Awards issue of

“Backstage West,” a highly respected trade paper for the Southern

California stage community. Rather than selecting one winner in each

category, Garlands are awarded to several nominees chosen by vote of

the Backstage West corps of critics. And Erik Patterson was one of

the few names to be recognized in three separate categories.

He was selected in the playwriting category -- along with such

heavy hitters as August Wilson and Murray Mednick -- for his play,

“Yellow Flesh/Alabaster Rose,” which filled the Theatre of Note in

Los Angeles nightly for a run that was extended for two weeks. He won

for best performance as an actor for his work in “Leopold and Loeb”

and for ensemble performance in the same play.

This is a 26-year-old kid, seven years out of Newport Harbor High

School and three years out of Occidental College. His first

full-length play was given a workshop production during his senior

year at Oxy. While he supported himself uneasily with a retinue of

often minimum wage jobs, he wrote voluminously, hung out with Tim

Robbins’ Actor’s Gang and saw his own work performed in workshops and

one-act programs until “Yellow Rose” attracted considerable attention

-- and paid patrons.

During these years of hoping that some commercial theater

heavyweight would see his work and offer him a commission, Erik began

to realize that playwriting is an economic indulgence that can best

be supported by screen writing. And so he joined up with a partner

who has screenwriting credits and whom he knew to be creatively

compatible. The results -- now starting to come to fruition -- are

impressive.

Erik and his partner have just signed a contract with a TV cable

network for an episodic one-hour dramatic show they created. They are

presently polishing a script for the pilot. If it is approved, the

pilot will be filmed, and if that, in turn, is approved, the show

will go into production, and we will never again have to help Erik

pay his car insurance. Meanwhile, he and his partner have a movie

script being read at high levels and several other creative projects

of promise in the wings. They have acquired those appurtenances of

success, an agent and an entertainment attorney. And through all

this, Erik has written a follow-up to “Yellow Rose” that will be

produced by the Theatre of Note in May.

This sequence of events catches the irony of the tenuous and

shifting degree of separation when your kid leaves home and then pops

back and forth into your life like a peripatetic visitor bringing

home a deep breath of fresh air and some dubious social habits. You

have only a vague idea of his life away from home, but all the old

concerns kick in when he appears, no matter how many successful plays

he may have written.

We never know whether Erik will show up with a beard or clean

shaven, whether he’ll be wearing his Goodwill pants and the shirt he

borrowed from me, or what hour of the night he is likely to arrive. I

have an almost spiritual faith that his 1992 Toyota with 120,000

miles will get him here, even though I have considerably less faith

that he changed the oil at the proper time.

There are growing signs, however, that creative maturity is

beginning to have a mild effect on his personal habits. His car is a

case in point. As far back as I can remember, it has served as a kind

of upscale homeless shopping cart, piled to the ceiling with old

manuscripts, discarded clothing, candy wrappers, dog-eared books,

magazines that dated back to the Ice Age, and junk that defied

description. By some miracle I don’t want to probe too deeply, he

arrived last week with a clean car, claiming this as a sign that he

is a new man. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I’m most excited about the

distinction of his work, the cleanliness of his car or his guilt over

not making his bed. But I’m ready to take a small pinch of credit --

after his mother, of course -- for them all.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.