Turning 49 / Seven Monologues
Welcome to Issue #50!
Feels like a milestone, coming right after I turned 49 on Sunday.
For the second year in a row I drove out to Mt. Whitney, thinking about a line from one of Norman Maclean’s stories that says, “It’s surprising how much our souls are alike in the presence of mountains.” I needed a dose of awe and wonder to remind me.
Last year it was just me and Ellie. Julie got to go this year and we spent a few hours in the fresh air, taking in the waterfalls and small pond at the Whitney Portal Recreation Center before driving around the Alabama Hills and hiking a little among the black volcanic rock on the side of the highway. It’s spectacular out there and at three and a half hours away it’s practically in my backyard.
In hindsight, I wish I'd saved that piece from the last issue for this week's because I don't really have any newfound wisdom to share after five days into my 49th year.
But about that piece from last week...
I originally wrote it as a letter for my niece and nephews. I pulled it out again because I read an issue of Story Club, the newsletter from George Saunders, where he talked about, “Goofing around in adjacent areas.” He told a story about how writing the music for one of his audiobooks took him back to the early days of writing, where he was just messing around, having fun, reacting to whatever impulse he had in the moment.
I did the same thing with that piece, which I originally wrote as a letter. I just started playing with it, breaking up the lines and seeing where instinct and intuition told me to stop. Sometimes it was more satisfying to end on a complete thought, sometimes it was about how it looked visually on the page. I was just pushing words around and seeing how each little change made me feel. The stakes were low, the fun quotient was high.
Being a Leo with a compulsion to share, I added it to last week's newsletter. I tried adding my usual intro but it felt wrong to break it up or kick things off with a business update. It seemed more fun to just jump right into it and let you respond to it however you were going to. It was one long experiment, bringing new life to an old piece of writing.
I underestimate how much I need that in my life in general.
I was listening to one of my favorite songs by Amos Lee and it gave me the perfect mantra for carrying that spirit of play with me through the week while working on the day job.
"Keep it loose, keep it tight."
I got notes back from the studio and producers on my pitch document this week, now I’m in the middle of writing the third draft. I also finished a brand new pitch for a series that wasn’t even a gleam in my eye two months ago. It showed up out of the blue as a few disparate ideas started connecting, one to the other.
This one is a lot of fun. There are genre procedural shades of X-FILES, a little dark humor and eccentric ensemble of something like the FARGO series, and a touch of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS awe and wonder. It's set deep in the mountains of Appalachia, an attempt to tell a sci-fi story set pretty close to home.
“Keep it loose, child.”
Have fun, change things up, keep experimenting.
“Keep it tight.”
Revise and refine. Make it better. Do more with less.
Have a great week!
7 Monologues
In college we had an Audition Techniques class and one of the assignments was to write your own audition monologue. That assignment may have very well altered the course of my life. One of the challenges that he gave us was to try to show as many colors as we could in sixty-seconds. If you started with a comedic monologue, find a twist that could take you to a more dramatic place, and vice versa. Even better if you could add a second turn and give a three act structure. I loved that challenge and the monologue I wrote went over really well.
A few days later my professor came up to me in the hall and handed me a flyer for a 10 page play competition at Actor's Theater of Louisville and told me he thought I should try to enter. I wrote a play using those same principles, trying to show as many "colors" as I could and give the play a three act structure in under ten minutes.
Once other students found out I had a knack for writing monologues people starting paying me to write them for their auditions and jury performances, which we called "boards." Sometimes it was $10, sometimes $20, sometimes it was just a Subway sandwich. But I was getting paid to write and I was developing that muscle, trying to turn each one into a small play with a beginning, middle, and end.
Over the years I've written more for friends and family. I thought I'd pass a few of them on here, both as an example of that original exercise, and because I know there are some actors and filmmakers who read this newsletter. If you want to use one for something, go for it.
For my writer friends, this is a fun exercise to do if you're stuck or looking to riff on something with low stakes. Pick a person, pick a place, try to find some conflict and vary your colors. Try to create a three act structure in 60 seconds or less. (Not all of these have three acts, some of them had different assignments)
1) Minutiae
It's not the big things you miss. Anybody who knew him for ten minutes could tell you about his sense of humor. Any girl he ever flirted with could talk about how he made you feel like you were the only person in the room, or how he was good with kids and animals. The broad strokes belong to everyone. Friends and family and coworkers and near strangers. But, the little things. The minutiae. That’s the stuff that belongs to me. The rhythm of his breathing while he slept. Long slow inhales and exhales. Those nights I would curl up behind him and put my arms around his chest and try to sync my breathing up to his. Or his hairy knuckles. It's a stupid little detail, but I studied his hands so much that I knew the layout of every finger, bone by bone. At the funeral I watched these people get up and talk about him like they knew him, like they were his best friend in the world, and, it took everything I had to keep from standing up in the middle of the eulogy and screaming out, “What about his knuckles? Did you know he had to sleep on his left side because if he laid on his back he would snore so loud the people next door would bang on the wall and make me roll him over? Or, how his beard smelled like cookies?” I would have looked like a crazy person. So, I kept quiet. And, when it was all over, I got in my car and drove home by myself. Back to our empty apartment. While everyone else was invited to his family's house. They just went on pretending like I didn't even exist.
2) 80's Movies Lied To You
The 80’s movies lied to you. They told you that the cheerleader was shallow and materialistic and kind of stupid and that the really interesting one, the deep one, was the weirdo girl with the mismatched socks and the frumpy hats. The outsider. It's a cliché now, they call it the manic pixie dream girl. It's also a lie. I'm sorry, I'm not going to apologize for being emotionally stable and that I like my outfits to match. Yes, I shop at Banana Republic and not the Goodwill. I have a grown up job, where people depend on me. I can’t blow off the day to go watch butterflies in the arboretum. I don’t play the accordion, or paint whimsical sun catchers. I'm not going to compete with her. You think she's fascinating and artistic, good for you. She brings a bit of magic into your life, makes you feel ten years younger, congratulations. But I do want to go on record with what I think are two important points. One, a laundry list of eccentricities doesn’t make somebody deep. Two, while she was experimenting with different means of self-expression in high school I was cheering and doing gymnastics. I can still bounce a quarter off this ass, and if you think that’s shallow, I really don’t give a shit.
3) Art Institute
I don’t know what it was, it was a canvas covered in black paint with a metal pipe running from the floor to the ceiling, with a bunch of scraggly wires somebody stole from a junkyard. It was the kind of thing my ten-year-old nephew could do with two hours and a twenty-five dollar gift card to Wal-Mart. But everyone was standing there, staring at it and talking to each other in reverent tones, taking it so seriously. “Ah, yes, I see what she was trying to do here, it’s a comment on blahbedy, blah, blah, blah.” And, I wanted to scream at them and say, "This is bullshit!" Then I thought, "Oh, God, maybe it's just me.” Maybe I'm not smart enough or insightful enough to appreciate real art, and if I'm not capable of recognizing it then how the hell am I ever supposed to create it? That was so depressing. I left the contemporary section and I started trying to find an exit, I just wanted to get out there as fast as I could. Then… I turned the corner, and I saw these windows. And, all this color. This glorious burst of deep blues. Three stained glass panels, the sunlight pouring in behind them, making them shine so brightly that I just stopped cold in my tracks. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. Honestly, it broke my heart, it was so beautiful. And, I thought, please… God, or the universe, whoever is out there listening… I just to give somebody else that same feeling one time before I die.
4) Scorpios
Let me tell you something about Scorpios. My father got into an argument over a parking space with a neighbor, a guy he drank beer with for years. Before the argument they were thick as thieves. After the argument, my father was so mad at the guy he wouldn't even walk in front of his house. He would park on the other side of the street, walk down to the corner and cross back over just so he wouldn't have to walk in front of the guy's house. He did that for twenty-five years. So, if you think I'm gonna apologize to you? Or, admit some responsibility, shoulder some blame you think I deserve for the mistakes you made, then you got another thing coming. It’s never gonna happen. And, I don't care what your mother says, or your sister, or your friends or my friends… this is between me and you and nobody else. So, please, listen to me while I say it plainly for the very last time. You need to grow up. Or I'll be parking across the street for the rest of my life.
5) Religious Differences
I know you don’t think it’s true, but I’m glad you made me go to Sunday school when I was a kid. I had such a crush on Jesus. How could you not? He’s, like, totally famous. Everybody was always singing songs about how great he was. And, the pictures? He’s tan, he’s got great abs, long beautiful hair. He’s like the perfect combination of surfer and rock star. I was sure that when I grew up I was going to marry him and be Mrs. Jesus Christ. But, I didn’t. I married Doug Peterson, and yes, he plays bass guitar in a Whitesnake cover band, which is, you know, less awesome than it sounds. And, he’s got a bald spot and a bit of a gut instead of a six-pack. But, he’s flesh and blood and he saved my life when every other prayer I said went unanswered. Nobody out there was listening. But Doug was. I love him, and he loves me, and he accepts me for who I am. I'd appreciate if you guys could do the same for him.
6) Omaha
We sat on the shore of the lake and watched the hot air balloons lift off on the other side. Every color in the spectrum, rising up over the mist and floating up into the early morning sky. Not a cloud, anywhere. You took off your shoes to walk barefoot on the beach but you wound up cutting your toe on the metal dock. We were back in the cottage, dressing your wound, when you kissed me for the first time. I felt like the whole world stopped spinning. Like there was no time, no space. I haven’t told you enough, but I still feel like that, every time you kiss me. The doctors tell me to keep talking to you. That if you can hear me then it might help to bring you back. But, it’s breaking my heart. It’s not fair that this happened. We were supposed to be in Barcelona, not a hospital in Omaha. It’s not fair that if you can hear my voice and I can’t hear yours, just the machines that are beeping and breathing for you. But if by some miracle you can hear me, I want you to remember that morning on the lakeshore. I want you to look up and see those brilliant flashes of yellows and reds, getting smaller and smaller, getting swallowed up by the blue. I want you to trace our path along the beach, back to our cottage, where I’ll be waiting for you. Come back to me, please. Come back and kiss me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I’ll be waiting.
7) Dealbreaker
No, he's great, he's so sweet. Things are perfect, really. It's just… okay, his dad is kind of a famous serial killer. God, why does everybody make that face when I tell them? It was his dad, not him, Mark wouldn't hurt a fly. Does it cross my mind every now and then, when he's carving a turkey or he picks up a roll of duct tape at Wal-Mart? Sure. But, I've got to be realistic. At the end of the day this kind of thing isn’t a dealbreaker. Bad credit, probably. No goals or ambitions, definitely. But, I can't go around kicking every nice guy to the curb just because they had the bad fortune of being sprung from the seed of the Chattanooga Choker.
Gary Whitta's Gun Dog
I got a huge boost of inspiration from watching Gary Whitta talk about his new project, Gun Dog. Long story short, Gary is a wildly successful screenwriter but he's also a guy who got into this business to tell original stories, not just playing in other people's sandboxes. Like so many of us, he's looking for new ways to tell stories and create his own IP. He wrote a new novel, self-produced the audiobook, now he's releasing it over nine live episodes where he does an intro and Q&A wraparounds.
The first episode was great, and I just love the spirit of the whole endeavor. Check out his announcement video for the whole story:
Nicolle Galyon
I've been obsessed with singer/songwriter Nicole Galyon this week. I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and caught a bit of her talking about how Nashville is a "ten year town" and how her break came just as she was ready to leave it behind. Maybe someone else needs to hear this:
Taco Tuesday at The Cannes Short Film Festival
Our director John Lawson entered our Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge short into the Cannes Short Film Fest. We're in the shorts block 3. A ticket can unlock a block of films anytime during the festival, August 15th-21st, and the ticket holder can re-watch a block as much as they'd like, within 24 hours. All ticket holders are also invited to rate films for the Audience Awards.
Catalog | Cannes Short Film Festival
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