Me & Orson Welles

“This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles’s pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. And it was the week I changed my middle name—twice.”So begins Me and Orson Welles, a comic coming-of-age novel set against the background of the twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles’s debut production at the Mercury Theatre on Broadway in 1937. Richard Samuels is the stage-struck seventeen year old from New Jersey who wanders onto the set one day and gets a small role in Welles’s Julius Caesar. His life will never be the same….ABOUT THE AUTHORKaplow is a teacher and writer who for more than fifteen years has written satirical songs and sketches for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, where he created “Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters.” His acclaimed young adult novels include Alessandra in Love and Alex Icicle: A Romance in Ten Torrid Chapters. He lives in Metuchen, New Jersey.FROM THE AUTHORMe and Orson Welles reflects a lifelong interest in the theatre and in the 1930s. This is the period of my father’s youth, and the novel is dedicated to him, as his spirit and humor invigorate every page. Specifically, I remember sitting in the basement of the Rutgers University library, looking through a copy of Theatre Arts Monthly from 1937, and there was a photograph from Welles’s production of Julius Caesar which featured Welles in a dark coat and black gloves, sitting at the edge of the stage. Next to him was a young man playing a ukulele tricked up to look like a lute. My first thought was: The real story here is the kid. What does this moment feel like from the kid’s point of view—to bear witness to a celebrity creating himself right in front of your eyes? Investigating the history of this theatrical moment, I discovered the young actor from 1937, Arthur Anderson, was alive and living in New York. He was an invaluable source, and he still has the ukulele, which h