Hey, I Know an Oscar Winner!

Way the hell back in third grade, I was in some dopey play in which I had only one line ("I am at the back of the bus!"), standing behind a painted cardboard bus. Rather than print up programs, at the end of the play they decided to simply have the principal take center stage, read off the characters' names, and then whoever played that part would step forward, take a bow, and exit through the audience. In no time at all, the principal got to my character. "Mr. Brown," she said, and nothing happened. I stood there. "Mr. Brown," she said again (having no idea who had played the part), and still I stood there. In my head I was thinking, and this is absolutely true, "I wonder who this idiot is who played Mr. Brown? It can't be me, I played Mr. Brown. (One, two, three.) Oh, shit!" Then, after all that time, I had to step forward and exit through the audience as absolutely everybody thought "Geez, what a maroon!" But sometimes the brain just misses something really incredibly obvious, what can I say?

Marc Rosenbush called me this afternoon and said "Why didn't you tell me Corinne won an Oscar?" and I suddenly felt just as I had in third grade. See, Marc was on a plane Sunday night so he didn't see the Oscar ceremonies, but I did, and when he called later I told him the major winners. But I didn't tell him Corinne was one of the winners because I simply hadn't noticed.

Here's a picture of what I saw but did not register:


That's director Eric Simonson on the left, and producer Corinne Marrinan on the right, clutching her Oscar. They won for Best Documentary Short, for A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin (which I have not yet seen). Eric Simonson is a noted stage director, a Tony nominee some years ago, and I met him once, maybe twice back in Chicago. So on the Oscars, when Eric's name was called I immediately said "Wait a second, is that the same Eric Simonson?" Because the name is just common enough that I couldn't be sure. And then when they won, and went up onstage, I was still stuck in trying to figure out if that Eric Simonson was the same Eric Simonson from Chicago. He looked like him, but I still wasn't entirely sure. This process was so absorbing that I completely failed to notice that the person standing next to him, whose name had also been called, was someone who in fact I do know.

It's not that I know Corinne all that well--for a while she dated my friend Marc Vann, who is also a Chicago guy, so I had met Corinne several times through him, plus Marc Rosenbush hired her to stage manage the big Beckett festival that Splinter Group mounted ten years ago. I last saw Corinne when she and Marc Vann held a joint birthday party here in L.A., maybe two years ago. But she is an absolute gem, I always liked her plenty, and since her name is of course far more distinctive than Eric Simonson's, how on earth did I completely fail to notice her even when she was standing up there on international TV?

Because I once played Mr. Brown, that's why.

Congratulations to Corinne. Very richly deserved.