Waitaminute. I could be mistaken, but . . . in the middle of the song, does he say . . . ‘shit’?”
Joe Quesada was Marvel Comics’ editor in chief. Securing Joe’s imprimatur mattered. Which is why David Garfinkle and I were in the conference room of Marvel Comics’ Midtown offices in late February 2009. But after about ten minutes, we had run out of things to talk about, and with the conversation becoming awkward, David decided to play Joe one last song—the latest version of crowd-pleaser “Boy Falls From the Sky.”
The final two minutes of this lengthy song are sung over a swirling bed of electric guitar chords increasing in intensity. The words themselves sorta wash over you, which is why it was surprising that Joe asked us when the song ended if “shit” was in the lyrics.
David and I cleared our throats.
“What? No. Uh . . .”
“Maybe. Wait. Oh . . . oh yeah.”
The lads and Julie—all of us, actually—enjoyed the existence of that one profanity in the show. It was that one pebble of grit in an otherwise family-friendly spectacle, but Joe’s voice was full of urgency.
“Peter Parker can’t say that. He just doesn’t. Ever. For all these years we’ve been very careful to make sure Spider-Man never resorts to that kind of language.”
David and I assured Joe that we got what he was saying, and that we’d talk to Bono and Edge about it. And I really did get it, and two years later it would wind up affecting decisions more consequential than what to do with a four-letter word. What Joe unintentionally put in my head was that we had been entrusted with a living artifact; that Spider-Man wasn’t globally popular by accident; that Spider-Man was an icon and that our job was not to be iconoclasts.
David and I left the Marvel offices fretting that the word was the one lasting impression we left with Joe. But the next day, Joe Quesada sent a tweet to thousands of followers:
G’morning, Marvel U! Woke up with Spider-Man Musical songs in my head. Curse you Bono and Edge, why do I love you so?!?!
The tweet was money in the bank. Turn Off the Dark was on a roll. Opening night had finally been officially announced. Group tickets were actually on sale. That same week, U2 released its twelfth studio album, No Line on the Horizon, and Rolling Stone magazine gave it five stars out of five—“their best album since ’91’s Achtung Baby.” And asked about Spider-Man on the red carpet before the Oscars, Evan Rachel Wood not only confirmed she was “definitely going to do it,” but added, in front of the live cameras to millions of viewers, that “the show is incredible.”
And Jim Sturgess? Was he in? Julie was hopeful, but was still waiting to hear back from him. He was busy shooting Peter Weir’s The Way Back, so he wasn’t answering any e-mails.
Then, on March 10, 2009, Evan sent word to Julie that she couldn’t play Mary Jane after all. No explanation why. Maybe Marilyn Manson didn’t want his girlfriend in New York City while he lived in Los Angeles. It didn’t matter. She was out.
So we needed to find some singers, and quick. Because in the auditorium of The TimesCenter in two weeks’ time, a few hundred ticket agents were going to be treated to an hour-long teaser of the show. How aggressively these agents were going to push Turn Off the Dark over all the other Broadway shows vying for attention depended on how carbonated this teaser could get the agents before they headed back into the street.
So a few singers from the 2007 workshop reading were recruited, including T. V. Carpio. But with Jim Sturgess skinning deer on set in Bulgaria and in no hurry to leave, who was going to deliver the big Peter Parker songs?
Knowing Julie was on the lookout for a young, up-and-coming actor to play Peter Parker, T. V. Carpio told Julie the year before to check out Reeve Carney, the lead singer of an L.A.-based band called Carney. When Julie caught a Carney show in New York, she agreed with T. V. that the young man with the unfairly gorgeous face and dreamy tenor voice was destined for great things. But was he dweeby Everyboy Peter Parker? With that long hair, and that bone structure, he was more like royalty. Ah, wait! Julie ran him through a quick audition, and Reeve—with almost no acting experience—was on a plane to Lāna’i to be Prince Ferdinand in Julie’s Tempest playing opposite Helen Mirren, Alan Cumming, and other luminaries. As Julie recalled later, he was the only one who auditioned for the role who convinced her that “he believed in love.”
But Julie still didn’t know if Reeve could pull off Peter Parker. And Reeve, for his part, was devoting himself full-time to his band, working alongside his brother and lead guitarist, Zane, another handsome and lanky Carney. (The lankiness was part of a genetic legacy shared with their great-granduncle, Honeymooners comedian Art Carney.) However, with no other charismatic young singer available on quick notice, Reeve was summoned to New York, and after a day of rehearsal, he was sent with the four other singers to the green room at The TimesCenter to await their moment onstage.
Meanwhile, a room was quickly set up for a photo shoot, so that there would be a couple of pictures of the creators for the Turn Off the Dark website, which was going to launch in a month. Edge, Bono, and Julie posed as if for an album cover—arms crossed, no smiles.
Unexpectedly, they then beckoned me over. God no. I’m not tall, but somehow I’m almost a head taller than my three collaborators. I was in my father-in-law’s old jacket, and my hair that day was late-period Beethoven. But I hooked a thumb into my pocket, and the results on the website a month later were what I expected—I looked Photoshopped into the shots. But the pictures, with pride of place on the site, clearly trumpeted, “These are the four creators. If you love the show, thank these four. And if you don’t, it’s probably the fault of that guy.”
The auditorium was packed. The media had been barred entry, but a blogger or two managed to get in (and, of course, the Post’s Michael Riedel). The guitar riff from “Boy Falls From the Sky” silenced the crowd, and David Garfinkle appeared at a microphone, gamely smiling under the lights. “Today we are thrilled to be presenting you a behind-the-scenes look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark!”
After a four-minute sizzle reel of highlights from our Los Angeles flying workshop, Julie proceeded to wow the crowd with pictures of the set and some trippy supervillain costume designs that Eiko Ishioka had dreamed up after finishing her last gig designing the costumes for the fourteen thousand performers at the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony. (The onus fell on Spider-Man’s beleaguered associate costume designer, Mary Peterson, to decipher Eiko’s severely broken English.)
Julie then spoke warmly of Bono and Edge before calling them onto the stage amid hugs and starstruck applause. Edge and Bono swore that without Julie Taymor, they would never have thrown their hats into the ring.
“As far as I’m concerned, Julie is a national treasure,” Bono averred. “We call her our mentor and our dementor. Because we’ve never met anyone more unreasonable than us.” He turned to Edge.
“It’s kind of nice getting bossed around by a chick, isn’t it?”
Edge shrugged daintily. “We like it.”
Our five singers were then introduced, “Rise Above” began to play, and Reeve stepped up to the microphone. Wearing a lot of long hair and jewelry handmade by his mother, he emoted with closed, fluttering eyelids while contorting his body like Joe Cocker. He usually sang with a guitar strapped to him, so he was feeling very exposed, but he was hiding his discomfort well enough. As skinny as the microphone stand, he conjured up one of those 1940s caricatures of young, raw-boned Frank Sinatra. As Riedel would report the following day—he succeeded in “fluttering the hearts of all the ladies in the auditorium.”
In fact, an out-of-character Riedel was all positivity about the event. And he wasn’t alone—the verdict was unanimous among those who wrote about it. At the post-event cocktail party in the Westin a couple of blocks away, you could hear bubbly chatter coming from happy Spider-Man investors.
But along with our two composers, Julie and I were ushered upstairs. In a fluorescent-lit conference room, over some dismal chicken breasts, a dinner meeting ensued with Marvel’s David Maisel and Amy Pascal, the cochairman of Sony Pictures. David and Amy were concerned about the dark and less approachable second act. But Julie deftly pivoted to the subject of publicity. With the enthusiastic backing of Bono and Edge, she pitched her latest idea: a worldwide one-night-only live broadcast of Turn Off the Dark on a thousand movie screens on the musical’s opening night. Amy and David promised to look into it.
Of course, if the date of opening night were to change after a thousand-screen, international opening had already been booked, the headache would be epic. But why would the date of opening night change? Anyway, the important thing was that we all understood that now was the time to capitalize on the excitement this project was generating. Agents were jockeying for private auditions for their clients. Opening night parties, like the one at Sardi’s for Exit the King that month, were buzzing with gossip about the show. Amateur actors from across America were posting unsolicited audition videos on YouTube.
And Lesley Stahl and the 60 Minutes crew were now swinging by SIR Studios to film a few minutes of our last music workshop—part of a segment CBS would be airing the night of our first preview. Bono had been enjoying the rare experience of watching others perform his tunes at this workshop. Nonetheless, he shook the cobwebs out of his throat, took a mike, and performed “Boy Falls From the Sky” while the cameras rolled.
The song had some punishingly high notes, but Bono rose to the occasion, transfixing the film crew as he davened into the microphone, the band behind him urged on by Kimberly Grigsby (our newly hired vocal coach and conductor), who was counting time with snapping wrists and slicing hands, while stomping and undulating on a platform in front of Bono in her bare feet. Lesley Stahl had entered our studio cordial but all business. She left a couple of hours later a gooey-eyed fan.
Meanwhile, just in from Los Angeles, David Campbell was scrutinizing the song’s arrangement with his arms crossed. He was our new orchestrator. The scrawny, tousled-haired fellow had the quickly scribbled appearance of someone out of a Jules Feiffer cartoon. The father of rock star Beck, the obliging and unassuming David Campbell had orchestrated songs on over four hundred gold and platinum albums, but this was David’s first Broadway musical—a fact all of us considered a plus.
“Boy Falls” was our “eleven o’clock number”—a song sung by the protagonist that delivered the emotional climax of the musical (e.g., “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, or “Memory” from Cats). There was another kind of eleven o’clock number, however, intended simply to ensure the audience would be alert and refreshed for the musical’s final scenes. These numbers (think “Shipoopi” from The Music Man, or “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story) were often memorable precisely for being so balls-out expendable. “Black Widows on the Town” was ours. As Julie acknowledged, the entire scene—being little more than a sexy arachnid tap dance—could very well end up in the landfill. But Julie wanted to give the concept its best shot, and in her mind, the song Bono and Edge penned wasn’t sealing the deal.
Julie burst into the little studio room where Bono and Edge were camped out and demanded they write a new song with furious female energy. Forget the club-sound crap. The composers pushed back. Julie pushed back harder. No question about it—the boys were “getting bossed around by a chick.”
Bono and Edge grouchily sent everyone out of the room, and shut the door. They emerged a couple of hours later with a hard-driving, bizarrely infectious mashup of sampled violin notes, Pixies-inspired punk-surf guitar, and Bono alternating between a bizarre falsetto and a growling Sex Pistols shout, spewing syllables in aggressive bongelese interspersed with “I’m gonna eat ya up!” The new title: “Deeply Furious.” Julie threw her arms around Edge and Bono—huge hugs of gratitude for each of them. No way was this number getting cut now.
We wrapped up the last of the SIR sessions with the band tearing through a new rendition of “Picture This”: guitars sounding like overheating turbines; cymbals getting bashed; Edge, as Norman Osborn’s wife, singing, “Is this looove?!” over and over, with Bono bongelesing increasingly frantic syllables until it was a machine-gun rat-a-tat that finally devolved into the screams of an idealist getting tortured in a machine of his own devising.
“It’s so sad,” concluded Julie. “Love.”
Someone got out the champagne, and we clinked paper cups in Studio 2. And then the whole team took over a Swiss restaurant down the street, with Bono remembering to stand up in the middle of dinner to make a toast. He thanked everybody in the room—the assistants, the engineers—no one was left out. How many toasts had I seen him deliver now? Gracious toasts, amusing toasts, humble toasts, to other people, to the future, to the moment. Instead of a rock star, if he had been born in a nineteenth-century shtetl, he’d have been the badkhn—a Jewish wedding jester—getting the dancing going, working the band, delivering toasts. He would have been just fine in a shtetl. Bono hopped into a town car before dinner ended, accidentally leaving those iconic sunglasses behind on our table. He was always leaving things behind—phones, jackets—he knew this about himself. Julie sighed fondly at the thought of him, then realized, to her chagrin, that he also skipped out on the bill.
• • •
The e-mail from Bulgaria wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a blow. Still filming The Way Back—buried in snow and just loving it—Jim Sturgess had written to explain to Julie why his decision to decline the offer to play Peter Parker “has been such a difficult and complicated one.” But it was definitive. He didn’t want his career forever colored by his role as “the Singing Spider-Man.” So now there wasn’t a single actor lined up for our show.
Bernie Telsey was head of one of the largest casting agencies in New York. Having cast Across the Universe for Julie (Jim Sturgess was a unibrowed unknown when Telsey brought him in to audition), Bernie’s Telsey + Company casting agency was now tasked to find thirty-one cast members for Turn Off the Dark: nine “principals,” eight additional actors to play the dozens of other parts, and fourteen dancers.
A couple of Telsey reps hopped a plane to conduct open-call auditions in cities across the country. Back in New York, Julie sat behind a long table with Bernie Telsey, David Garfinkle, Teese, and me. I suppose if there were a better way to conduct auditions, it would have been invented by now. Still, it’s always excruciating for everyone—from the actors with their livelihoods on the line, to the people behind the table, who have to hear the dialogue read so many times they begin to feel real hostility toward the scriptwriter. This includes the scriptwriter.
And by the time the auditioner had been in the room a minute, you could almost guarantee Julie’s mind was already made up. Julie was a snap decider. Not just about auditioners—about everything. Movies, shoes, sandwiches—anything you could have an aesthetic or sense-oriented opinion about, Julie not only had an opinion, but an instant opinion. (According to Julie’s mother, Betty Taymor, Julie didn’t like the wallpaper in her room and told her mother so. When she was three.)
Of course, that was Julie’s job, wasn’t it—a job that had left her buried in a pile of shiny awards: to cultivate a well-defined, compelling aesthetic and make choice after choice based on that aesthetic. And each of those decisions shuts a few doors; ferries the work closer to finality, with only hindsight revealing which decisions were inconsequential, and which ones were a bullet dodged, or a time bomb triggered. With such stakes, some dithering would be understandable. But when two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Julie rarely broke her stride. The snappiest decider I’ve ever known.
Nevertheless, here in the audition room, Julie would—practically without fail—give the auditioner her full attention all the way to the end. She didn’t betray her thoughts. Her rules for herself and the others behind the long table were unspoken but clear. No eating during an audition. No taking notes during an audition, certainly no doodling. No whispering. No looking at your watch or your phone. Smile warmly with the hello, be gracious with the parting thank-you.
Pent-up impatience and disappointment got vented between auditions.
“Bernie, what would make you think this person is right for the show? In any way right? Haven’t these actors been screened first? How many more like this are we gonna see?! Because this is just a huge waste of time!”
And Bernie would shrug, sigh contemplatively, and say, “Well . . . it’s a process.”
Julie’s eyes would then turn skyward. From the throat, something guttural.
The exchange occurred enough times to get predictable.
It was a process.
Julie believed she had made it eminently clear what she was looking for: the charismatic; the authentic; crags, heavy brows, crazy noses. The human masks she’s been sculpting all her life had honest-to-God features. It was better to have that, better to have uniqueness, than generic handsomeness. Don’t show her the blown-dry, the slick, the suburban, the—you know—the musical theatre type.
But Bernie also knew that the voices had to be blendable, the acting had to be competent, first choices were rarely available, and discernment and compromise would yield the results we were hoping for. In other words, it was a process.
The roles of the Geeks were filled with a young and motley foursome, including Mat Devine, lead singer of post-punk band Kill Hannah (whose honest, hilarious reading of Peter Parker nearly nabbed him the lead), and T. V. Carpio, who would play the smartass Girl Geek, Miss Arrow.
Actors who have achieved a certain renown almost never audition for roles. So for Norman Osborn/Green Goblin—a role that could provide a nice star turn for an A-list actor (and a whole second act to relax in the dressing room)—Julie drew up a wish list of actors, and sent it to Bernie. In the meantime, Julie was particularly eager to see Patrick Page read for the part. (“The best Scar we ever had,” said Julie of his performance in The Lion King.)
We were unaware that when Patrick showed up for his Goblin audition, he was in the midst of a months-long breakdown. Overcoming depression long enough to get out of bed and make it to the audition room, Patrick handed the rehearsal pianist some sheet music, stood at the back of the room, fixed a grave stare at the folks behind the long table, and walked very . . . slowly toward us as the relentless chords of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” began to play: Welcome to my Nightmare . . . Welcome to my breakdown. Patrick Page has a deep bass voice. Huntington Lighthouse–foghorn deep. Combined with this ironic, insidious song, it made for a perverse, intense audition.
However, Alan Cumming—who hadn’t read the script or heard any music—sent word that he would do the part. And just like that, Alan was in. Julie didn’t even know Mr. Cumming had been asked. But this willowy, Scottish-born actor turned in what Anthony Hopkins called a “terrifying” performance in Julie’s Titus, and had just played the scheming Sebastian in her Tempest. If he wasn’t our first choice for the role, he was certainly a serious actor, and definitely a name, so Julie wasn’t complaining.
For our villainess, Telsey + Company had already sifted through over three thousand potential Arachnes: Israeli pop idols, American movie stars, indie rock standard-bearers, Balkan and Ukrainian chanteuses self-promoting on MySpace. So when Natalie Mendoza seemed to jump effortlessly through our hoops, we didn’t trust our eyes and ears at first. Raised in Hong Kong and Australia (with roots in the same Filipino communities as T. V. Carpio), Natalie’s looks were unplaceable, but beguiling. And there was a real Bronze-Age power in her rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (its sinuous psychedelia was a good fit for Arachne).
However, Natalie’s take on Arachne’s solo in “Rise Above” was marred by pop stylings. The little hiccups and faux-bluesy melismata were American Idol’s fault. The TV show’s influence had infected practically every auditioner. From the beginning, Julie, Edge, and Bono had insisted on the “straight tone” for Arachne. Listen to the Bulgarian Women’s Choir—it had to be that, it had to feel ancient.
“That’s why, musically speaking, I think The Lion King worked,” Julie once mused to Edge. “The African music in contrast to the contemporary pop. The mythic set against the mundane of Elton John. Well, not mundane, but—well, you know what I mean.”
“ ‘Mundane’ in the best sense of the word,” suggested Edge.
Kimberly Grigsby had been the music director of Spring Awakening, and so had experience getting the worst pop inclinations out of a performer. A couple of months later, after a few sessions with Kimberly, Natalie Mendoza returned for another audition. The rumors were that she had just come back from the Himalayas, the home of her longtime guru. True or not, she didn’t seem like the same woman we had seen just two months before. Looking demure yet formidable, dressed in a white tunic with a sort of understated diadem throwing off subtle flashes in the light, Natalie now had the aura of someone who grew up in a mythical city east of Nepal and west of the moon. Her singing was straight and pure, her eyes spoke of millennia endured in loneliness and longing. In her voice you could hear the capacity for selfless love and remorseless violence. After three years and three thousand possibilities, we had found Natalie Mendoza, and Natalie Mendoza had found Arachne. She was in.
Meanwhile, the field had been narrowed down to two potential alternatives to Jim Sturgess. Matthew James Thomas came straight from London, where the twenty-one-year-old was most known for his role as “quick-witted singer-songwriter” Jez Tyler in Britannia High (he was still sporting the role’s distracting, forehead-obscuring swoosh of bright blond hair).
The other potential Peter Parker, after the dozens we had screened . . . was Reeve Carney. No question about it—his mere presence in a room generated buzz. “Who is that guy?” more than one tingling actress asked Julie after killing time in the waiting room with Reeve. He had recently begun his suspenders-with-jeans phase, and he was actually getting away with it. Even so, Reeve’s acting chops were worrying. In The Tempest, he was an earnest prince in a movie where close-ups, intimate scenes, and editing could play to Reeve’s strengths. But could he put across angst and comedy in a two-thousand-seat theatre? Peter Parker’s humor was what set the character apart from practically every other superhero. If Peter wasn’t funny, the show was going to be in trouble, and Reeve’s strong suit was definitely not comic timing.
But with the first rehearsal day bearing down fast, we had to make a decision. Because of the physical demands of the role, Wednesday and Saturday matinees were entrusted to Matthew James Thomas, who would get to move to America (he talked endearingly during auditions about the awesomeness of New York). But the new face of Spider-Man would be Reeve Carney.
Soon after Reeve was cast, his band released their first-ever single, “Love Me Chase Me.” In the video, Evan Rachel Wood played Reeve’s lover. They looked good together. Evan two-times him, then kills him, but they still looked good together. Which was excellent, because Evan just notified Julie: She had decided to play Mary Jane after all.
Danny Ezralow had already put the multitude of prospective dancers through a grueling all-day boot camp. (After watching the dancers krump, leap, and tumble for six hours, all the work we non-dancers had been doing in audition rooms suddenly seemed so constipated.) Danny’s list was now winnowed down to a couple dozen dancers.
So now in a Telsey agency audition room, headshots of all the actors and dancers still being considered were taped to a wall. Bernie moved pictures around, discarding some, replacing others, as a consensus began to form. Within an hour, the only photos left on the wall were of those performers who would be in our show. It was June 23, 2009. Turn Off the Dark was cast.
This thing was actually going to happen.
Because of delays getting building permits to renovate the Hilton, the show had just been pushed another five weeks, putting opening night sometime in April 2010. But! Spider-Man was swinging in front of a full moon and shooting a shimmery web on posters now on display outside the Hilton Theatre. Inside the theatre, plaster was raining down as renovations got under way.
And Alan Cumming finally signed his contract.
Holy crap, this thing was actually going to happen.
By the end of July, Danny Ezralow had secured an apartment. His wife and young son uprooted from Los Angeles so they could be with Danny in New York for the next nine months.
“Have you found a place yet, Glen?”
“Shit. No, Danny. I forgot. I’ll get on it.”
I trawled through apartment rental websites and found a groovy little studio in the East Village. I’d be abandoning my wife, who was going to stay upstate all autumn tending to the needs of our three little ones. It’s not what she bargained for. I felt rotten. We had moved out of the city because no one seemed to care that I was in the city when I was in it. And, wouldn’t you know—now that we had left it . . . well, no matter—this was for a good cause. I was going to finally get our finances back in the black. It was just three months. It would be like heading off to sea in a whaling ship. I just needed to make sure I brought back a whale.
I wrote the general managers at Alan Wasser Associates. I would be subletting and it was time for them to send the first month’s rent and security deposit to my landlord. They promised to do so.
A week later, the landlord called me: “So where’s the money?”
“They haven’t sent it yet?”
“Hey!” said the landlord. “I’m letting the apartment go if I don’t see the money this week. I’ve been screwed before by theatre people.”
“Yeah, theatre people are the worst. Well, don’t worry. This is for Spider-Man. We’re good for it. I’ll just give them a call.”
I reached one of the general managers.
“We can’t give you the money.”
“Why not?”
A pause. A sigh.
“Glen . . . I wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”
“?”
I called Erin O over at Hello. She’d know why there was weirdness. She knew everything that went on with the show. It was probably some mix-up with my contract. But Erin didn’t answer her phone at Hello. And, damn it, Danny had put the fear in me—I was going to be homeless if I didn’t secure an apartment soon. I called Erin on her cell phone.
“Hi, yeah, I didn’t answer my phone at Hello because I’ve been let go.”
“?!”
“Yeah. Happened last week.”
“But you’ve been there since the beginning! You and Tony Adams!”
“Exactly. I was Tony’s assistant before I was David’s. And Tony’s not around anymore.”
“Oh man, that sucks. I’m so sorry. So you don’t know what all the weirdness is about.”
“Well . . .” She sighed. “I would just check the newspapers tomorrow.”
“?!?!?”
• • •
Should Broadway’s Spidey sense be tingling? Rumors have spread among legiters that the production sked for incoming mega-musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark may be threatened. The extensive work being done to prep for the technically demanding show, both in the shop constructing the physical production and in the theater where Spider-Man is due to bow, is said to have stopped . . . The halt is attributed to cash flow obstacles . . .
—Variety, August 6, 2009
“Julie?” My voice was pitiful.
“Yeah. It’s bad. David is twenty million short.”
“Godalmighty.”
“Yeah.”
“For a moment there, it sounded like you said ‘twenty million.’ ”
“I’m gonna make some calls.”
The one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money the one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money. . . .
There was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I’d caught, there—all tangled up and weary from the struggle—was Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man. . . . This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.
—New York Post, Michael Riedel, August 12, 2009
Riedel was always wrong about something in his articles. But this time I was having a hard time spotting it.
My father-in-law, the pastor: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
A letter from my bank: “Your home loan is forty days in default. Under New York State Law, we are required to send you this notice to inform you that you are at risk of losing your home. . . .”
Son. Of. A. Bitch.