Lawrence Holofcener
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Lawrence Holofcener has written for the stage, screen and television as well as the pop music field with plays, musicals, scripts and song lyrics.Some of these include: "Mr. Wonderful" with Sammy Davis Jr., "Ziegfeld Follies" with Tallulah Bankhead, both on Broadway, "Before You Go," a play on Broadway and in the West End, "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner on NBC-TV, and dozens of songs including "Mr. Wonderful," "Too Close For Comfort," and "Bye-Bye."
Day of Change
Read the book online at https://www.dayofchange.info/
There is a word
That springs to mind
When children or strangers ask
What kind of people were
The Americans?
Changers.
The Americans
In four hundred years-
A mere flash of lightning
In the mighty glow of mankind's sum-
Have altered since their birth
Not just this place
But all life on earth
For now
And a time to come.
In the beginning
Was the land itself
Happy child of a star's debris.
Desert, swamp
Mountain and shelf
Fashioned by wind
And ice and sea.
Tossing about
Imagine the fun
Twisting and turning
For eons and ages
Under the mothering eye
Of the sun.
In
On
And above the earth
An innocent kingdom cavorted.
The largest numbers of which by far
Were the smallest
Profusely assorted.
Yet among all things
Extant or extinct
None but the insects
Could boast most certain -
We were here at the overture
And we'll cheer
At the final curtain!
Smooth or lumpy
Thick or skinny
Some were frumpy
Some wore tails.
Vast varieties of shape they were.
One could roar
Another whinny.
Coats they wore
Of spines or scales
Or leather lined with unfake fur.
But for all their unrelated ways
And looks and language
Animals
For no apparent reason
Lived side by side
And separately
Season after season
After season.
Above, a small extract from the lyrical fiction work "Day of Change" and below, the forward by the author
"Day of Change was completed in 1976, the year my mother died. It could be argued she had no part in the writing but the spirit she instilled in me - in everyone - is in the book. Equally instrumental was the mill which we were in the turmoil of restoring. Literally toppling into its millstream, Julia, our small children and I worked, fought, laughed, cried and turned it into an environmentally sensitive home - dry toilets, wood stoves, furnaces and recycled water. The process was testing in the extreme. It is to my mother Lilly, the Mill in Three Bridges, New Jersey, and my wife Julia I dedicate Day of Change - one who gave me life, a structure whose life I helped prolong and the woman who gives my life meaning".
Lawrence Holofcener
"I Don't Live There Anymore," (www.idlta.com) the musical play which Holofcener contributed the libretto, lyrics and some of the music, and which premiered in Dorset UK and was dubbed hit of the 1993 Spoleto Festival, toured South Carolina in autumn 2000.
The musical is set in Ellenton SC, a small town which was obliterated by the U.S. government in 1950 when a site was chosen to construct a plant to produce the Hydrogen Bomb and highlights the humour, loves, and pathos of the people caught in the maelstrom of this catastrophe.
Mr Holofcener's most ambitious literary work is "Day of Change," a poetic story of the United States in the near future.
Other works, some as yet unpublished, include two quiet mysteries featuring Pleasanton Conquest, a retired naval commander living in a backwater on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and Britishisms, a Dictionary of British English.