This is Wizzo’s mom with Charlie Staadecker, a Seattle husband who commissioned a new play to be written as a birthday gift to his wife, Benita.
Wizzo and his mom were at the Fort Worth opening of that play,
Becky’s New Car, on Saturday night, July 30, 2011.
“I wanted to make this gift to Benita something unusual and memorable, something that would be a real legacy,” said Staadecker. And yes, his theater-loving wife was indeed pleased by the gesture.
“On Benita’s birthday,” notes screenwriter Steven Dietz, “I sent her the play’s first scene.”
lovers was commonplace in Shakespeare’s day and Mozart’s.
“My play is about a regular middle-class woman, Becky, who works in an auto dealership and her husband is a roofer,” Dietz elaborated. “She meets this slightly eccentric, somewhat bumbling millionaire, and through a bunch of misunderstandings, he offers her a chance to live a kind of parallel existence.”
The idea of having a secret double life fascinated Dietz.
“I think we all love those great little stories you find in the corner of the newspaper — you know, ‘after his death, Florida man is revealed to have three different families.’ That felt like the stuff of comedy to me.”
– excerpts from a column by Misha Berson, Seattle Times theater critic