Special Guest Blogger: Tennessee Williams

Authors, it is said, should wrote about what they know and i grew up with the perfect inspiration for the vicious tempered alcoholic Stanley Kowalski, my father.
When i was a kid i was bedridden with diphtheria for a year and it left me physically weak which disgusted my father but it gave me a chance to write some short stories, one of which i sent to the magazine Weird Tales and they bought and published it.    
Hang on a sec i thought, so i wrote another and entered that in another magazines story writing competition and won $5 and even when i went to University i carried on submitting stories into competitions and picking up small cash prizes but i never got to finish University as my father pulled me out of school to work alongside him in a shoe factory.
Luckily, my writing was starting to come good and my plays were being recognised and being performed and then i got a big break and went from obscurity to fame with my play 'The Glass Menagerie' .
In a span of ten years between 1948 and 1959, i had seven plays appearing on Broadway including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire.
One hopeful unknown young actor come to my cottage for an audition for Stanley Kowalski to find my plumbing was broken so he fixed the pipes before reading his audition for the play, getting the part and starting off on his career of being Marlon Brando.
Alas, all good things must come to an end and as quick as it started, someone changed what 'it' was in a play and mine went from being 'with it' to whatever 'it' wasn’t and everything i put out in the 1960's and 1970's slumped and my burgeoning drug problem never helped.
After the death of my long term boyfriend, several emotional breakdowns and a heightened drug addiction which saw me hospitalized many times during the 1960s, i became a customer of Dr. Max Jacobson, AKA Dr. Feelgood who was the physician for John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Judy Garland and if he was good enough for them, he was good enough for me, especially as he had a ready supply of amphetamines but unlike them, i stayed alive.
In my play A Streetcar Named Desire, i had the character Blanche DuBois remark, 'You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape' but it wasn't poor fruit hygiene that killed me, i said funerals are pretty compared to deaths and my death wasn't pretty, i chocked to death on a plastic bottle cap that got stuck in my throat.
As an author i always hoped that i would leave some magnificently profound last words but the manner of my dying denied me that and my last words as it turned out were 'Gawkh Gawkhhhhhhhhhh'.