The Daily Delaney

There's something I like about private eyes. The standard images are powerful... the trenchcoat, the cigarette, the man in the shadows... but what gets to me is the emotion of it all.  Look at Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon... really, look at him... You can't imagine him without seeing Humphrey Bogart... What I love about the performance and the character in the film is that for half the movie you don't know whose side this guy's on. Then there's a moment after he meets The Fat Man when he throws a fit and trashes the hotel room, storming out to prove he means business and he wants in on the action. The camera follows Bogart into the hall and out to the elevator. He pushes the button and looks down to find his hand shaking and he laughs at himself, as if to say "Wow, I can't believe I pulled that off" and you realize he's playing every other character off against each other to solve the case, to learn the truth... And ultimately, that's ...

The Best of The Northwest is coming up in just a couple of weeks, March 26th & 27th... I gotta get to work! Any suggestions of what you'd like to see me do? Snake Eyes available here

No Cause For Alarm

The guy in the picture here is Jack. He's from Alaska. He was a guest on the Royal Argosy Dinner Cruise this past Saturday. He didn't know it, but his friends had set him up to be a suspect in the murder mystery we were putting on that night. We ask people to give us some personal info  when they make their reservations so we can work them into the story. So Jack's friends gave us this picture. They had no idea how perfect a picture they chose. Saturday night, we opened a new script I wrote called "Spaced Invasion" all about alien abductees and recovered memories and lost hybrid spacebabies. Usually, I'll get info on a few guests a couple of hours ahead of time and then set about coming up with some insane yarn that ties them into the body we just found (in this show, it's a guy named Phredd, who might be an alien or might be a con man, but either way he's dead and his body was found up on the roof of the Experience Music Project). There's a r...

Sensory Overload I'm getting ready for three nights in a row of various comedic improvy mysterious things culminating in the first performance of my new mystery "Spaced Invasion" on the Royal Argosy Boat Saturday night. A little peace and quiet watching the snow flurry with the feline americans is just the ticket today.

This morning was a good news/bad news kind of morning. The good news was that it was a sunny day, my housemate Coop was in the kitchen making his daughters laugh, I was excited to write a speech for Rik and Piper's 20th anniversary party tonight, I was looking forward to a trip to see my sister this weekend, and down in Texas, Lindsey was getting ready to show off to a book editor. To top it all off, the first "Chronicles of Narnia" movie was playing in the background... and somehow that segued right into the bad news... As I sat at the table next to young Domina (who was, as usual, coloring very carefully within the lines) and started my morning news-surf on my computer, I ran right into the weird discovery that the man pictured here, one of the executive producers of the Narnia films, had died yesterday in New York City. His name was Perry Moore and aside from nurturing the Chronicles into their onscreen  lives, he wrote a very good book a couple of years back. It...

  "Teacher of the Year "  Here's to anybody who's got the guts  and the heart to stand up in front of a room full of kids  and teach them something... anything at all.