My Tyrants Have Conquered the West Coast.

So I get a MySpace friend request from a girl in California the other day, and, because I've never met her before, I take a look at her profile to make sure she's not a psycho-killer or a bad-poetry writing, gothed-out teenager or something. It's not that I'm paranoid, it's just that...well, YOU JUST NEVER KNOW. So anyway, I'm reading through her lists of favorite bands and movies when, lo and behold, I find my very own name under the HEROES section of her profile.

"Okay," I say to myself, "this has gotta be some kind of joke. Someone in California lists me as one of their heroes? Come on now. It's not April Fool's Day just yet. Who's messing with me?"

I went through her list of friends to see who we had in common...No one. I tried to think of who I knew in California....Aside from my Aunt Sylvia, no one. Hmmm, curiouser and curiouser. Seriously, I had no idea what to make of all this. But then, just as I was about to stop and ask for directions, I realized that one of her friends had posted a picture of Napoleon in her Comments box, along with a message that made reference to James Joyce and Hitler. And then it hit me. Aaaaaah, they've read my play.

So I sent her a message and asked how she knew about me, and do you know what she said? She said she'd seen my play "Do Not Collect $200" at a drama festival in Montebello and had "fallen in love with it." Now, this just floored me. A drama festival in California? No one told ME anything about this. So I dug a little deeper (special thanks to the good people at Google) and found out that yes, "Do Not Collect $200" WAS performed as part of the Fullerton College Drama Festival. And not only that, it took 2nd place out of about 140 different entries. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, I was pretty self-impressed.

Well, anyway, I found out what school had performed it and got on the horn with their drama instructor to talk about rights and royalties and all that good stuff. But, at the end of the day, that's not what really matters to me. What matters is that my little play did EXTREMELY well in a California competition. (The lady I talked to said it was really the talk of the festival.)And beyond that, I've got honest-to-God FANS.

Isn't life just full of interesting surprises?