{"id":4851,"date":"2010-05-10T04:02:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T11:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=4851"},"modified":"2010-05-14T08:13:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-14T15:13:38","slug":"a-conversation-with-mitch-albom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=4851","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Mitch Albom"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mitch and Janine Albom attend Tuesdays with Morrie at the Cameri\/Photo: Elizur Reuveni<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play<\/em>\u2026the familiar melody of Misty<\/em> sang from the keyboards late Friday afternoon at the Eretz Israel Museum where best-selling author, playwright, broadcaster and yes, musician Mitch Albom had just demonstrated his skills as a master storyteller.\u00a0Albom visited\u00a0Israel to attend the premiere of Tuesdays with Morrie<\/em>, co-produced by the Cameri and Haifa Theatres, give a talk on life and faith at Tishkofet, and to celebrate the publication of his most recent book, Have a Little Faith<\/em>, in Hebrew by Matar Publishing House, Albom not only found the time to play a song and give the pianist a sandwich break, but was generous enough at the end of this busy week to chat with Midnight East.<\/p>\n

Tuesdays with Morrie<\/em> is the chronicle of Albom\u2019s conversations with Morrie Schwartz, his college professor and mentor. These meetings took place in the last months of Morrie\u2019s life, as he was dying of ALS (known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease). It was their \u201clast class\u201d together, a lesson in life and love that has touched the hearts of millions. The stage version was co-written by Mitch Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher, premiering in the US in 2002. The Cameri \u2013 Haifa Theatre production is directed by Moshe Naor and translated by Rivka Meshulah, with Yossi Gerber, Iftah Klein and Liran Saporta. The play has been nominated for a Theatre Prize as \u201cBest Play in Translation\u201d and Yossi Gerber has been nominated as \u201cBest Actor in a Leading Role\u201d for his portrayal of Morrie. The Theatre Prizes will be announced this coming Friday, May 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ayelet Dekel<\/strong>: You wrote the stage version for Tuesdays with Morrie<\/em>, it\u2019s not always common for a writer to write the adaptation for his own book.<\/p>\n

Mitch Albom<\/strong>: I didn\u2019t want someone to imagine how Morrie and I spoke, I would have had a hard time watching that if they started making us more eloquent than we were\u2026<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: When reading the book, it\u2019s really your voice telling the story, but the play brings Morrie to life, literally, physically.<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: That\u2019s one of the reasons I wanted to do it. When Tuesdays with<\/em> Morrie<\/em> first came out it wasn\u2019t a book that anyone wanted to publish. It was very, very hard to find even one publisher to agree to do it. And when it first came out it wasn\u2019t a popular book or anything, it was very slow developing so when it became popular there was suddenly a big rush of interest of doing things to capitalize on it. Everything from calendars to day planners and music inspired by, and bumper stickers and little Morrie dolls, and bracelets\u2026 ridiculous!
\n\u00a0
\nI said no to everything, and they offered a lot of money for those things but that wasn\u2019t the reason I wrote the book and I wasn\u2019t going to turn the book into an industry. I agreed to do to two things: one was the movie because Oprah Winfrey asked me to do it and I trusted her. I didn\u2019t know what she was going to do. I personally thought – how can you make a movie about one guy who can\u2019t even move? How interesting is that going to be? But I figured if anyone can do it, she can do it. The other thing I agreed to do, after several years of them asking, was the play. And the only reason I agreed to do that was because I felt that while I liked the movie and I thought the movie was well done, in order to hold people\u2019s interest in a movie you have to develop outside story lines, it can\u2019t just be two people talking. It\u2019s not reasonable to expect that to work, it won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I realized that a play was probably the closest approximation of what really took place because a play really is two people sitting and talking to one another and I thought – well if anything besides the book could give people an idea of what it was like to be in that room, it would be a play\u2026I\u2019ve had people say after they\u2019ve seen the play, \u201cOh, that\u2019s what it was like.\u201d<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: It was a very moving experience, watching the play.\u00a0 It really is like being there.<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: You know there were times when I was sitting there last night where I felt very much like\u2026 Yeah, I remember this, I remember sitting there. Even the way that he sat, the way Morrie sat. Yeah, that\u2019s how it really was. We were just in a room, we were always in the same room, always the same stuff on the table: the beaker, and the urine beaker and some water and a straw because he couldn\u2019t eat very much. I did walk in with food all the time in a bag just like that and you know, then he would take it and put it in the refrigerator until one day I went and opened the freezer and all my food was in the freezer and that\u2019s when I realized he couldn\u2019t eat it. So it was very close to how it actually felt, even the quiet.<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: You mention the quiet \u2013 at one point in the play, Mitch tells Morrie, \u201cit\u2019s a different world in here.\u201d The play takes us into that different world. It\u2019s also very good at describing that other world of voice recorders and cell phones\u2026<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: Which you know very well.<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: It seems like this experience was a turning point in terms of your writing \u2013 that led you into other forms \u2013 fiction, plays. Is that reflected in your personal life as well, do you find the time to enter that \u201cdifferent world\u201d?<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: Well, from where my world was – most definitely. If you looked at my world and you\u2019d never seen it before, you would say: Wow! It\u2019s chock full of stuff. But if you compared it to pre-Morrie\u2026 I don\u2019t work anywhere near like I used to work, I don\u2019t have anywhere near the jobs I used to have.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Half my time is spent on charity work whereas none of my time was spent on charity work before that and so my quiet time is my writing time and I have that every day. I wake up in the morning and I go down and that\u2019s the first thing I do is write. I go downstairs a little before seven, I have a cup of coffee and I sit alone in my office. Everyone in the house knows you don\u2019t bother me during that time.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I do my writing, that\u2019s when I do my thinking. It\u2019s very reflective; it\u2019s what\u2019s enabled me to write these other books. Every book that I\u2019ve written since has been written in those quiet hours of the morning. I don\u2019t write any other time.<\/p>\n

One of Morrie\u2019s great gifts to me was recognizing you have to carve out this reflective time every day to think about yourself, think about \u2013 whatever. Not just always yourself. Ideas, the world\u2026 My books are my ideas of the world, I mean, I\u2019m not creating science fiction, you know, they\u2019re all stories about what I think matters in life. Sometimes they\u2019re filled with make believe characters and sometimes they\u2019re true stories, but they\u2019re always things that I\u2019m thinking about in terms of my philosophy of life, and I do that in the quiet hours that Morrie taught me to appreciate.<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: You started out as a musician and you\u2019re still clearly very involved with music. I remember reading that you perform with the writer\u2019s band Rock Bottom Remainders\u2026<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: Still do. Oh yeah, yeah, we just got off the road two weeks ago. right before we came here, we played in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston\u2026and the band is as bad as ever.<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: Bad in the good sense of the word, or\u2026<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: Well bad in like the funny sense of the word. Musically we\u2019re awful, but we\u2019re funny. We have a few real musicians in the band. For the most part, people are in it because it\u2019s \u2026funny. Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Ridely Pearson and\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Stephen King. Frank McCourt was in it until he died. Most of them can barely play and they can barely sing, but it\u2019s funny. We put on a show. People Like to see Amy Tan wearing a wig and doing some kind of song. I do an Elvis Presley impersonation.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t take ourselves seriously, but it is fun to play music. If you came and heard us you\u2019d say \u2013 oh they\u2019re not so terrible, but we\u2019re not very good either. We\u2019re funny and we\u2019re punctual – what more can you want from a band? We say 8 oclock, we mean 8 o\u2019clock.<\/p>\n

AD<\/strong>: Do you have any advice for young writers?<\/p>\n

MA<\/strong>: Well, if they\u2019re really young and want to learn how to write\u2013 read. It sounds very simple but I\u2019m amazed at how many people just want to sit down and start writing and they don\u2019t read. That would be as silly as someone wanting to sit down and play piano but never listening to music, you know. You can\u2019t read enough, and you shouldn\u2019t just read the kind of work that you want to do. Read, but if you\u2019re a fiction writer, don\u2019t just read fiction. Read non fiction, read newspapers, read poetry. If you\u2019re a poet, don\u2019t just read poetry. Surround yourself with art.<\/p>\n

AYELET DEKEL<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play\u2026the familiar melody of Misty sang from the keyboards late Friday afternoon at the Eretz Israel Museum where best-selling author, playwright, broadcaster and yes, musician Mitch Albom had just demonstrated his skills as a master storyteller.\u00a0Albom visited\u00a0Israel to attend the premiere of Tuesdays with Morrie, co-produced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}