Thanks!

I should probably also explain why I said "no" to the sock-puppet thing.

First, the serious reason:

* I've noticed that some young playwrights go through a phase where they imitate Christopher Durang. But -- they don't quite get why Christopher Durang works. The reason why Christopher Durang's own Edward-Gorey-On-Mescaline sensibility works is because that is his own voice. He's not trying to be that weird, he actually naturally is that weird.

But a lot of playwrights, when they first read his work, it flips a switch in their head where they think, "ooh, wait, I can actually just be wacky and have it work. Yay!" And they end up writing stuff that just flogs that "Whee! I'm being wacky!" to death, and it all smacks of them just trying way, way too hard. It all ends up sounding....alike, and when you find you actually do not see a difference between the Cardinal-Richelieu-sock-puppet play and the Emily-Dickinson-and-Walt-Whitman-applying-for-government-cheese play, that's a big problem. These plays aren't terrible, they're just...visibly forced wackiness for wackiness' own sake, and that just isn't quite good enough.

That's why I rejected that -- because I could tell it was going to be another forced-wackiness play, and wouldn't be worth the read.

* And now the weird reason:

That was actually the seventh play we'd had submitted to us that year that featured a sock puppet. I have no idea what was going on, but we got seven plays that featured sock puppets that year. It gets better -- five of those seven plays were also about 9/11. Yes, you read that right -- 9/11 plays that featured sock puppets.

To this day I wonder if some very weird memo had gone out that I didn't know about.