The Bloody Doors Off

“Son, are you doing religion?“

“Are you like me, you enjoy a good ham and cheese sandwich, but oh no! the bread is just too small and the ham is drooping and touching the dirty table you kept promising to clean with an antibacterial wipe but just couldn’t get to? Do you crave multigrain with more mass? Paper comes in eight and a half by eleven inches, so why shouldn’t your bread products? Now you can, with Ronco’s new letter-sized loaf.

Two wildly bizarre (and in the case of the latter, very SCTV with Dave Thomas pitching) lines of dialogue crop up in my head, unbidden. While I’m doing the dishes. The large pot still needs to be scrubbed. Had to abandon, make myself a sandwich (my stomach talked to me first) and sit down in front of my gigantic, curved monitor and breathe these to life.

Ah.

There’s the problem.

Well. Not a problem.

This always happens, a failure to launch if you will.

The idea hits. (Two this time! What?!)

I type it out.

And ask myself.

Um, what’s next?

Fuck if I know.

It took me years to properly birth A Song For Rachel. I was initially struck listening to music. Concept stuff. And an image pops into my mind’s eye, a woman struggling in frigid water after falling through the ice. There was a story to break there.

And, yep, you got it. Didn’t go any further.

Until the day an odd piece of dialogue popped into my head.

Beat.
MARY (CONT'D)
You have a healthy glow. My mother inhaled a pack a
day. The only glow around her came from a lighter.
The INTERN giggles.
INTERN
Sorry.
(quietly)
Healthy glow.
The INTERN snorts, clears her
throat and straightens in her
chair, attempting to compose
herself. She fails utterly, and
breaks out laughing.
INTERN (CONT'D)
I like you, Mary.

And I had. Everything.

I don’t want to wait years. Not months, days, hours, minutes.

I want now.

Realizing how I feel artistically bereft, not having written anything of real substance in over a year.

Take Beethoven. Dude became deaf and that didn’t stop him composing. It was always there for him. Mozart. Hemingway. Steven King. (Dude, slow down a little, okay? We’d like a breath between finishing one of your novels and digging into the next.) Prince.

I do NOT compare myself to any of them. I have … a modicum … of talent. I’m allowed to call myself a playwright. And I’ve been paid, motherfuckers. More than once. I’ve made it to zoom festival main stages, and made the short list with others. Wanna see my rejection emails? There are a lot. (In the trash folder. One day I may shred.) I was mortally wounded (metaphorically) from a savage review for my second ever Fringe show. (EYE Weekly. DRIP.) And I experienced euphoria as one online arts critic called my first show in Hamilton as one of his top 3 picks.

I was busy back then. Ideas came easier. Marlo and I joined two cold reads companies that hosted live reads of new works by local playwrights. I used it as a testing ground for a short play I’d written in a response to the previous week’s prompts given to a random playwright to incorporate into a short story in 7 days. (I wasn’t the winner. But the end product of that piece, Last Call, introduced a character I’d only hinted at in another story (Snow Angels). And, not to humblebrag, but Lost in Translation was accepted by a California drama collective to produce using Zoom, and posted to their website on YouTube.

Snow Angels, Lost in Translation. Last Call. The three best brief works I will ever write.

I felt like Aaron Sorkin during Covid. I was blogging, working to better previous works. Contacted several friends and held an online reading of A Song For Rachel. And Marlo successfully pitched it and directed as part of Alumnae Theatre’s Zoom series.

And then something happened.

Like a light switch to my creative storytelling drive was switched off.

But tonight. In the span of ten minutes.

And I’m at a loss. Soon I’ll second guess and declare that I’ll revisit them in the morning and if it still feels viable, I’ll create a new subfolder for them on my desktop.

But until then, it’s gonna bug me.

Is the son doing religion?