Baldridge—Writing:
home
Playwright is a Word, like wheelwright, shipwright
My very first teaching gig, outside Sunday School, that kind of thing, came in my early 20s at The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, or CTY, where Junior High and Highschool students take courses for college credit.
There I served as Teaching Assistant in Playwriting —which I’d briefly studied at Texas Tech University— and The Essay, of which I knew nothing beyond having read Montaigne.
Nevertheless, I offered solo “units” in each. To date, one of my favorite gigs.
I’ve since taught screenplay and playwriting in places as diverse as Mexico and South Korea but my writing chops have somewhat expanded in the mean time.
I Got my Start, Years Before, touring the country with a sketch comedy troupe
A Going Concern targeted youth camps, clubs, churches (nothing “blue”, all “positive energy”) and whatnot.
We wrote our own material, traveled thousands of miles per week, slept —five young people and a driver— in one van. We ate fast food, drank anything but water as we crisscrossed the nation.
In the Rockies, my first crossing of the continental divide, I jumped out, shouting— My pee for the Pacific! —before noticing my urine was bright orange.
It’s amazing any of us lived. Need I say: it’s a bit of a blur?
Proctor of Performance -OR- A band is like a marriage
For more than fifteen years with my performance “heptet” HOWLOOSEANATION, I served as Artistic Director.
I wrote press releases, composed songs, devised scenarios, penned the libretto for our operetta, The Long Count —this was the show that premiered at the Montreal Fringe in 2007. I’d been inspired by the (then) approaching end of the Mayan Calendar.
My sci-fi premise:
Scientists, detecting the unraveling of time itself, desperately strive to reverse its flow…
All of which is now, of course, clearly occurring!
Journeyman Journalist — my decade at the DN
During those same years I became sort of world famous in Lincoln, Nebraska— a line which has gotten laughs as far away as Seoul, South Korea.
When I found out The Rag (affectionate nickname of The Daily Nebraskan) actually paid, well I was in the office like a shot.
The Johnny Carson black box theater was spanking new in those days and brought in a metric ton of experimental dance.
Who wants to be the dance writer?</a> was a question I could only answer with: Yo.
By the end of the decade (part-time student, I worked for a living, y’all. No nepo baby, me!) I’d been a reporter, a section editor, served on the Publications Board.
I’d drawn op-ed cartoons, written headlines and generally mentored generations of writers, artists and the many and various ne’er-do-wells and drunkards attracted by the pittance of a remittance.
“Studying” Writing is Like “practicing” surgery
Perhaps because of this, I was granted some special dispensation to take graduate-level writing courses as an undergrad, at one of the midwest’s (then) premier MFA programs.
I took all of them.
At some point, inspired by They Might be Giants’ Dial-A-Song project, I launched StoryLine, a call-in, storytelling service —new recordings daily, for a full year.
No lesser light than Allen Ginsberg called in to encourage me in this experiment that definitively built the machine in my brain which spits out pithy prose.
To this day, with a little lubrication —braaaat! —out pops a paragraph!
Lame Claim to Fame: my time in TV-Land
As a Producer for MeTV in Chicago —in those days quite the mom-and-pop joint, with its own big guy in the corner office— I created interactives, promotions, performed voice-overs.
I largely retroscripted “classic” TV shows into new jokes, deconstructed narratives.
This was the low-power station with the nation’s largest audience —cunningly placing its antennae atop the Hancock building, it reached all Chicagoland.
Later, licensing to cable took MeTV Great American Horror Hosts.
Producer, Production, Product, that inevitable declension
Thus I entered the realm of “interactive marketing,” serving as producer on innovative projects for Fortune 100 clients like Diageo.
With Publicis Groupe I helped create, for thebar.com, —a long defunct, Flash-based, live action bartenter who remembered you from last time, took drink orders, commented on the weather in your location (called you by name, if yours appeared on a list of hundreds) and told ribald stories, cracking insider jokes.
This won a national award for innovation, though those who remember Burger King’s down-low promotion, the frenetic Subservient Chicken will be familiar with the technical concept.
Our bartender was a bit like that only, for him, we wrote fifteen hundred wittily interlocking scripts!
A Loose Unsyndicate — I create community
It may have been some premonition of the coming slowdown that saw me complete, in early 2020, my first short story in many years.
Immediately, as the governor of New York closed down our universities, I reached out to literally everyone I knew who’d ever earned a dollar from their writing, trying to put together a writer’s group.
I found one.
Who later brought one.
Today, A Loose Unsyndicate (named, at our first meeting, by combining an adjective and a derived noun) still meets every week and boasts six-and-a-half constant contributors.
And though the membership is not exactly secret, I have sworn never to reveal the coordinates of that ashram.
Some of us have sold cartoons and other content to The New Yorker. One manages the social media of a prominent video game studio.
A graduate of Chicago’s Second City writing program is a member, as is an entrepreneur whose business provides interactive narrative learning content to American schools.
One is a full member of SFWA.
That’s me. I’m that guy.
Membership Hath Privilege — I go pro
That first short story, after 20 years of every other kind of writing, produced its progeny of dozens. Though it has yet to sell (I’m working on it!) many of its children were picked up and paid for.
While I’d fancied myself a magic realist when I was stapling together those 1990s zines together (my Homunculus lived atop toilet tanks all over the city, its little stories the perfect length for… reflection) this and all these later stories are clearly speculative, most falling squarely in the Science Fiction sandbox.
I’ve sold to Asimov’s, Analog, The Fabulist and bunches of others —earning enough in sales to qualify for and finally join The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, better known by its ancient monicker, the Science Fiction Writers of America or the SFWA.
Rather than tell you about it, I’d have you visit my brutalist, hand-coded writer’s site.
There, most of the cover art images link to the online stories —exceptions being print-only titles. As the embargoes lift on republication, I expect to be linking to some sort of document.
I just don’t want it to look like “ANSI A” paper in double-spaced Times New Roman!
Screenplay as Playform — Playcrazy after all these years
Haven’t done much like theatre since the Plague (early 2020s) but I now have the sense that my future as a playwright might lie in animation.
As an animator, I’m a puppeteer, and as a puppeteer, an actor, improvisor, writer —and I like writing for actors…
So this is new, and actually must —due to the strict exigencies of the screenplay format— appear in an 8.5/11” white slab. It’s meant to commemorate (and exploit) a property that has never not made money:
Popeye, that spinach-snarfing sailorman, made his glorious entrance into the public domain in 2025
I got to wondering if there might be something in OLD Popeye —and then I remembered: we already gots one!
Folks, I give you: Poop Deck Pappy!