I love going out for breakfast. So does the wife. Two reasons: first, breakfast rocks when someone else is cooking it. And second, it makes for good people watching. As theatre people, a crowd at a breakfast place is a veritable feast of character studies. We love to play "Married or Dating?" while we eat. We watch a couple at a table and we try to decide, by their posture, their interaction or lack thereof, their level of contact, if they're a freshly sexed-up couple basking in the afterglow by the delicate sheen of the morning sun reflecting in their syrup, or a long-married pair who just needed to get out of the house for a change and still not talk to each other while they eat.

We were leaving a restaurant in Hull, MA, one morning. As far as I can recall we must have seen a couple who were obviously in that shiny new stage. And the idea came upon me: I wonder if the waitress knows? I think to a certain degree they must develop that sort of sense about people. They deal with it every day. I took that idea and I did the writer thing and ran with it--all right, so the waitress knows. What if she can't keep her mouth shut?

Thus, this play. It's a very silly piece, and it's meant to be. I should probably apologize now to every actress who has played or may eventually play Dori for making 90 percent of her lines incoherent babble about waffles. But it can be very funny if you play it like it's all she can manage to blurt out.

We premiered this play in early 2008 at Curtain Call Theatre's "If the Shorts Fit" festival. It was pretty much a dream cast--the loveable Martha Sawyer as the first waitress, the wonderful Marianne Withington as the coarser Luanne (whose "Grrrr" was stop-the-show funny every time), the very talented Shannon Lillian Hogan stammering her way through Dori, and my boy Steve Abouzeid...a guy entirely too good looking to let the audience figure out the punchline ahead of time...as Ben. I was honestly amazed at how big the laughs were that first night. And when Steve hit the final line and the blackout fell, there was a picture-perfect half-second pause before the audience got it and a whole fresh wave of surprised laughter washed over the place. Spot-frigging-on.

This show was taken to the Boston Theatre Marathon by Another Country Productions, my thrid consecutive Marathon. Sadly, I had to miss that one. I heard it went over well.

After its Marathon run, I sent it to Smith & Kraus in response to their call for scripts for their anthology, The Best 10-Minute Plays of 2009, 3 or More Actors. It will be my third S&K anthology appearance.

Little Factoid:

Our breakfast that day wasn't great. We'd been lured there by a menu that offered creme brulee French toast. Doesn't that sound great? It wasn't. We haven't been back. But I thank them for helping me plant the idea.

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