Regarding the peculiar ethnic mix in A Cheap Dime Novel, I wanted, just once in my life, to get it all wrong like they did in the Saturday afternoon movies of my youth. Seduced by serials from Monogram, Mascot, and Columbia Pictures, I ran with heroes whose hats never came off, even while they jumped, parachuted, swam, and galloped after villains in cars that changed models in mid-pursuit (usually while going over the cliff before entering the secret cave of the evil Masked Ham, a short-wave radio-operating Japanese spy (usually played by J. Carroll Naish) who ran the orphanage in Pleasantville (usually played by South Pasadena.) Many years later and still half out of my seat, I came up with the beginnings of this play. As the plot swam along in a slightly fishy faux noir style, it lost its hazy, smudge-pot, California orange grove innocence of the 40s, and became en anachronistic memory-monster wandering through a dimly-lit, illusory city, bent on the very serious business of chasing its own celluloid tail.