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Rare is the Columbia employee who can dash off a clever bit of poetry celebrating the arrival of a new water filter in the office: "A cooler is to come, with water pure/Beat drums! Sound trumpets! Fire off a mortar!/Proclaim the news that everyone may know!/Thank you, O Dean, for going with the flow."
For Dennis Green, it's all in a day's work. A program director at the School of Continuing Education specializing in fields such as technology management, Green happens to have almost a dozen credits to his name for musicals that have run Off Broadway and in various festivals. To name a few, he was co-lyricist with Howard Ashman on Dreamstuff and provided additional lyrics for Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
His love for rhyme isn't just a hobby. For years it was the central focus of his life. After graduating from Emory College with a double major in English and theater, Green, now 61 years old, moved to New York to pursue his dream of working in musicals. "Someone asked me to write some lyrics for some little performance they were doing, and I found I had a facility for that," recalls Green. To pay the bills, he worked in a fair number of unrelated—and unsatisfying— day jobs, including one in the garment industry. Once home, he would work nights and weekends writing the perfect lyric.
"It's fun, but it's exceedingly time-consuming to do anything that's original," says Green, explaining that famous composers such as Oscar Hammerstein would sometimes spend four weeks on one verse of a song, "to get it exactly right."
After 18 years of living paycheck to paycheck, Green decided to switch to a money-making career. He arrived at Columbia about 16 years ago. "I love my job here," he says.
One by-product of having a stable, successful job has been a lessening of creative output. For a few years Green even put his writing on hold. "Once these responsibilities came up, your energies are sapped," he says.
Still, Green's muse has never completely left his side. His co-workers often ask him to write humorous pieces for departing (or, in the case of the cooler, arriving) members of the department. And recently he says he was "seduced" into working on another outside project called Creation: A Ghost Story. A twist on the Frankenstein tale, it was performed as a two-night reading at the Actor's Temple on 47th Street in March, and continues on its path of development.
"Would I love to have a show on Broadway or Off Broadway again sometime? Absolutely," admits Green. "I do know one thing when I retire—I'm going to spend my time writing."
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