This is the nineteenth post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project (find first post here). In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential,” it continues question four: “Meeting with the Mentor.” Name an inspirational figure (perhaps a teacher, colleague, friend, author, or public figure) who helped you see the possibilities? The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.
I left out one thing that happened between Sheila asking when she was going to read my next play and listening to the third track of Warren Zevon’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. I went to lunch with my co-workers, one of whom was Laurie.
Laurie was a fashion layout artist who made roughly the same salary I did, but she was also daddy’s little princess. Daddy was a big wig in the decidedly unglamorous world of toilets. So, Laurie spent much of her generous stipend looking glamorous. I had a standing $1 bet with her that she couldn’t make it through a week without blowing $50 on one of her lunch hours. After I’d collected ten weeks in a row, I offered to invoke the slaughter rule, but she kept paying up because she intended to be frugal and it was a good reminder.
In exchange for that $1, I sometimes stood in as a surrogate heterosexual male she could show off for. When she was excited to wear a new outfit for the first time, she’d stop by my cubicle, do some campy fashion model runway moves, toss her hair back and ask, “How do I look?”
It’s the kind of thing she would have loved to do for her on-again-off-again boyfriend. But business kept him on the road. He frequently cancelled dates last minute. We had missed our chance to meet him last summer at the Independence Day party she threw at her high-rise apartment overlooking Grant Park. She thought it would be great to have us all over to watch the concert and fireworks together.
Someone asked what he did for a living. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something to do with guns.” A moment of stunned silence followed by nervous laughter followed by genuine laughter when Laurie realized how her response had landed. “You can ask him when he gets here.”
When the Grand Park Symphony fired up the 1812 Overture (which ended with the fireworks) she called to ask why he was late. They got into a shouting match. She ended the call by slamming the phone down.
After lunch at the Walnut Room of Marshall Field’s, she picked up a stack of boxes containing outfits she’d had altered. There was a queue of senior women lined up by the elevator so we started making our way back to down via escalators. We offered to distribute the cargo as we got nervous watching her step on and off the moving stairs in her heels with no clear line of sight to her feet, but she prided herself a super-shopper and wouldn’t have it.
Photo by Bruce Mars from Freerange Stock
On the men’s department floor she teetered a bit, and a handsome young man swooped in to her assistance. She said she was fine, but as she got a look at him, she transitioned from confident super shopper to damsel in distress in a heartbeat. Adorable.
“I’ll catch up with you guys,” she said.
We went back to work. After an hour, James asked me if I knew where she was. I shrugged and told him what she’d told us.
She got back ninety minutes later. After receiving the obligatory reminder about taking long lunches, I dropped by her cubicle and asked, “How did it go with that guy?”
She turned beat red, covered her face, and said, “Oh my God!”
I smiled.
We both laughed.
What had happened during those ninety minutes? Track three of Warren Zevon’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School added an intriguing possibility. It’s a testosterone-fueled ode to free lance soldiers for hire called “Jungle Work.”
(For maximum enjoyment of this post, pause and listen to it now.)
I took out a fresh yellow legal pad and a fat magic marker and wrote the word ESCALATORS! Beneath it, in fine-tip pen, “an exercise in rising action.”
I turned the legal pad sideways and drew a line from bottom left to top right. At bottom left, I wrote “LAURIE and CUTE GUY arrive at her apartment.” At top right, I wrote, “Blackout. Curtain call music: Warren Zevon’s ‘Jungle Work.'”
Across the bottom of the page, I wrote three words: “MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND is there.”
And I had my next show. All I had to do was connect the dots….
If my first full-length play owed its inception to late night radio mysteries, this one was the bastard offspring of late night comedy (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Saturday Night Live, Second City TV) and its theatrical cousin: the farce.
The comedy of my childhood, sit-com or stand-up, was all about set-up/complication/punch line. The newer breed of comedy, born out of improvisation lived and breathed in the complication: set-up, yes and…yes and…yes and…yes and…(repeat as necessary) and didn’t give a flying…circus about a punch line. Sketch comedy was about escalation, like moving stairways in department stores and free lance soldiers in third world countries.At my next lunch hour, I stopped by the magazine section of Kroch’s and Brentano’s and picked up a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. The articles on practical survival skills and weapon maintenance were well-written and mainstream. Any outdoor sports enthusiast, camper, or hunter might benefit from them. Boring. Where I struck gold was the classifieds.
In the market for armed bodyguards? No problem.
Translators specializing in a wide range of African and Central American languages and regional dialects? Sure thing.
Experienced military advisor and scalable team: will travel? Of course.
When writing a mystery, once I had a good plot twist, it was easy to write a reverse engineer a first draft. To write a farce, I first needed a detailed blueprint.
Situation. LAURIE and CUTE GUY (I could global replace the names later) arrive back at her apartment. But they can’t get inside.
Yes and…she has trouble finding her keys because of all the make-up, fragrances, and other crap in her purse. He tries to excuse himself, saying he needs to get back to work.
Yes and…the door finally opens. She asks if he won’t stay long enough for her to model something special for him. Well, maybe just a minute.
Yes and…first they haul an absurd number of packages in. She goes into the bedroom to change. I’ll just be a minute.
Yes and…he looks around the apartment, bizarrely decorated with Central American and African artifacts. He asks her about her decorating taste.
Yes and…she says they’re not hers, they’re her ex-boyfriends. He collected them on his business trips. He asks what her boyfriend does for a living. She says, “He’s some sort of lumberjack.”
Yes and…disturbed by the incongruous answer, he looks at his watch and says he really needs to get back to work.
Yes and…she finally comes out from the bedroom in a sexy skirt and blouse. He likes what he sees.
Yes and…she suggests they look at the new outfit in natural light and go out on the balcony.
Yes and…while they do, MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND wearing fatigues enters from the kitchen eating a sandwich.
Yes and…he looks around to see the coast is clear and tip-toes toward the closet.
Yes and…he hears CUTE GUY say now he really needs to get back to work.
Yes and…MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND hurriedly goes into the bathroom.
Yes and…CUTE GUY gets as far as the front door.
Yes and…LAURIE asks if he wants to see what she bought in the lingerie department. CUTE GUY does. LAURIE goes back into the bedroom.
Yes and…CUTE GUY hears a groan from the closet.
Yes and…as he goes to investigate, MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND enters from the bathroom. “Well, hello…”
Yes and my lunch hour is over, but I chuckle at what I have so far.
Over the next three months, I put the yes ands on a set of 3×5″ file cards so I could add a new one to the outline or move them around until I get the sequence right. I try out card sequences on co-workers, get suggestions, go on lunchtime and after-work expeditions for ideas about how to furnish the apartment. When I feel we had a good enough mix, I work with my layout artist to arrange them into a set with a hall entrance, a bedroom door, a bathroom door, a patio door, and a closet (enough entrances and exits for a farce).
For the backstory stuff, I try a variety of occupations and hobbies for LAURIE and CUTE GUY. I use the Soldier of Fortune classifieds for MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND.
What kind of “lumberjack” mission had MERCENARY EX-BOYFRIEND been on?
What went wrong?
Who was in the closet?
Who was looking for him?
What kind of hell was about to break loose?
But I felt good about the non-punch line.
LAURIE (realizing the time):
My boss is going to kill me!
(Blackout. “Jungle Work” by Warren Zevon.)
That summer, I took my lunch, my file cards, my legal pads, and my set layout to a bench in Grant Park with a clear site line to Marshall Field’s and the balcony of Laurie’s high-rise apartment where the whole farce plays out. Once all the puzzle pieces were in place, I started writing from the perspective of CUTE GUY who sees this harrowing ordeal as a matter of life and death. LAURIE sees it as another lunch hour.
It didn’t bother me a bit when Sheila passed on the project. She said her humor was more old-school. “It’s definitely you. It’s just not me.” I was getting the occasional script request from my Who Shot Captain Dark? query letter. I just added a paragraph for Escalators. No big deal. If nothing came of it, I’d had a great time writing it.
But something did come from it, and it taught me a lesson I didn’t know I needed to learn.
