Samuel Beckett would have been as delighted as a toddler with a bubble blower at the dark absurdity of my situation. On Nov. 6, 2024, hundreds of people braved Los Angeles traffic and sat for the first preview performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Geffen Playhouse. An eerie, discordant sound cue droned as I waited for the lights to bloom and thereby begin the 2½-hour odyssey of despair and postmodern hijinks. But as the lights came up, I had only one thought: “I wonder what the hell is left of my goddamn house?”
Earlier that very day, the day after the 2024 election, that afternoon, my house caught on fire. As I was rehearsing in L.A., my wife Holiday was evacuating our pigs, dogs, and peahen into her truck as embers flew through the air, embedding themselves into nearby hedges and shingles and gutters. You see, there was a small fire about 10 miles away. But as we all now know, when you add the Santa Ana winds to a distant fire at 60 m.p.h., all hell breaks loose. Luckily, our handyman Scott was installing some doorknobs that morning. He quickly inflated the tires on our pig trailer, while Holiday used a giant bass net to capture Alma the peahen. Holiday later told me embers were whistling down like fiery shrapnel as the sky filled with smoke. As of curtain time, because we had not been allowed back onto the property, I had zero idea how much of our house was left. Two of our neighbors’ homes caught fire like Roman candles and evaporated. But thanks to the moxie of our fire department (and our cinder-block walls) we lost only a few rooms. Plus a couple dozen trees, a shed, parts of our roof, our fences, and most of our sprinkler system.