So whn Slayden informed me that Craig Wright, the playwright for "Grace," "The Pavilion" and "Recent Tragic Events" had decided to come up the next weekend and he needed someone to handle the travel plans, I quickly volunteered to serve as host, chauffeur and whatever else he needed.

What is great and terrifying about Third Rail is we learn how to do what we do as far as running the business by doing it. We have no prior experience in marketing, grant writing, PR, accounting and well, travel coordination, thus the experience curve better be pretty damn steep or mistakes are going to be made. To make matters a little more stressful, Craig is not merely a successful playwright -- he is a major player in Hollywood with his own Television Show, "Dirty Sexy Money," for which he collaborates daily with Donald Sutherland, Jill Clayburgh and Peter Krause. So he's used to be taken care of, and I wanted his trip to Portland to be special. Because at the root of all this we want to commission him to write a play for us. This is the goal.

Relieved that my flight booking actually worked I picked him up Saturday morning at PDX from Burbank. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, and told me he had no luggage. I'd e-mailed him earlier that the rain was biblical, hoping he'd appreciate the reference. He said, "It's good to feel the cold again, I don't need a coat. It's great to smell clean air." Apparently he had been writing until midnight and had to get up at 4:30, so packing was a low priority. As we got in the car he asked me for the first time of many times over the weekend, "What are we doing?" I said, "Breakfast?" "Yes, this is good," he replied, and I inwardly celebrated. I took him to Bread and Ink Cafe, and we started to ease up a little, him in a new place, probably worried we were mental theater geeks, and my nervousness abated a bit. He asked, "Does Portland have a bookstore"? It was at that point that I realized Portland sells itself.

We go to Powells, and he mentions he wants oysters and has a friend coming in from Seattle, so I make reservations at Jake's and let him loose in Powells. He loves poetry and art books, found six he liked and gave me an anthology of American Poetry because I mentioned I liked William Stafford. The book had been written in furiously by what had to have been a high school girl deeply into poetry. He apologized but we both understood it was cooler for being illustrated.

I dropped him off at the Heathman for some rest and picked him up later for his interview with Marty Hughley of The Oregonian, which I had arranged. Marty is a very smart man. He prepared well for the interview, but you have to understand that Craig Wright may be a bit of a genius. Keeping up with his narrative was like trying to count stars. He would quote Schopenhauer as if it was a sound bite we all knew, he would quote lines from his plays that I had played and forgotten as if he just wrote them. His eloquence was humbling. He speaks with passion at lightning speed. Our brains started to hurt.

When we came to the show he started to get a bit antsy. He actually disappeared in the Firehouse for a while to take a quick nap in the conference room upstairs. He wanted a seat next to the aisle. I was imagining what it must be like to write a beautiful play like "Grace," then come to a strange town to a theater company with very little pedigree -- the anxiety of having to sit through a production that might destroy his work would be considerable. As the play started I began to hear little "hmmms" and "ahhhs" and then real laughs. Walking out, he turned to his friend from high school who had never seen a production of his plays and said "I really liked it" and then he told me it was the best or one of the best productions he'd seen of any of his plays.