Monthly Archives: November 2010

Writing prompts

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I haven’t shared much of my creative writing in awhile so I thought I’d post a couple of my favorite pieces from a writing group I participated in a few months back.

This was a common exercise:   someone picks out a random word and you have about ten minutes to take off from there.   It’s fun, it loosens up your brain-—my sometimes glacially-compacted vocabulary-—and it helps you find your voice.   In my case, that voice tended to be ironic and absurd.

TRAUMA

She named the twins Trauma and Drama.   No one ever knew exactly why.   There were stories and explanations.   She used to be a stage actress.   The girl’s father was foreign—from Guam or something like that.   And this—the lamest—from my ever understated mother:   “She was a little eccentric.”   Trauma and Drama.   I knew why she came up with those names.   The woman was batshit nuts.

Trauma and Drama followed me through kindergarten, grade school and all the way to junior high.   I always thought of them as neglected porcelain dolls.   They were identical.   Straight black hair.   Skin the color of dishwater.   Big black pupils that took up all of their eyes.   They always looked like they were about to cry, but they never did, at least I never saw them crying.   You couldn’t help but be fascinated by them, and I noticed they only had three outfits that they alternated between themselves through the week:   one gray, one blue, one pink over-sized shirt, all the same style, each embroidered around the collar with tiny hearts, that they wore through all the seasons, paired with a pair of dingy, baggy jeans.   I wondered how they decided who got to wear which one each morning.

Kids used to laugh a little at them when they walked into the lunch room or came out on the playground, always hand-in-hand.   I think they spooked the teachers.   They never got called on in class, and wherever they were sitting, the teacher seemed to wander to the other side of the room.   Sure, they got teased, but they stuck together.   Trauma and Drama.   They were all each other had.

GRACE

“There but for the grace of God,” Grandma said when the big birch tree split open in a lightning storm and missed hitting the house by an arm’s reach.

“There but for the grace of God,” she’d say three, four, five times during the nightly news.   Stories about the police finding missing children or hunger relief arriving in some far off country or the hero of the week who dove into the icy water to rescue the passenger from a car that flew off a bridge.

She also said it when some guy would hold the door open for her at the mall.   Or when the weatherman predicted rain on a sunny day.   Or when she found her reading glasses wedged beneath the sofa cushion.

I’ll tell you:  it all got a little tired living with Granny.   And it made me wonder what is there left for her to proclaim to be a miracle.? My lord—she’d seen it all!   And doesn’t such a reckless overuse of a proclamation cheapen the real acts of grace, the real miracles when they actually happen?   Taking all these thoughts together, I’ve come to the conclusion that religion is a load of bunk.

 

Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister

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Previously books and movie reivews, this week Broadway.

It’s been a little while since my partner and I went to a show, last spring actually, to see the silly, contagious ode to 80’s headbanging Rock of Ages.  Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister is equally tongue-in-cheek in tone but a lot more clever and satisfying.

Busch has a cult following.   His theater and film projects haven’t made it to the marquee’s of Times Square or the strip mall multiplexes (with the exception of his Tale of the Allergist’s Wife). But his admirers will follow him wherever he goes from Off Broadway to the community theaters across the country.

He works in the medium of 50’s/60’s screen diva reincarnation: Die, Mommy, Die! (Bette Davis), Psycho Beach Party (Joan Crawford), which perhaps has a limited audience, but for those of us who could imagine few pleasures greater than snuggling in for the night to watch All About Eve, he delivers big time.   There’s absurdity galore, and emoting doesn’t begin to describe Busch’s stage performance, but I wouldn’t classify his portrayals as send-up or parody.   As ridiculous and vulgar as things can get—his sexually voracious Angela Arden in Die, Mommy, Die comes to mind—he manages to walk that difficult line between caricature and misogyny. He is, after all, a gay man in make-up and a dress who loves the campy female characters he recreates. The send-up is in the subversion of the sunnied, homogenized family-friendliness of 50’s and 60’s screen hits.

In The Divine Sister, Busch plays Mother Superior at St. Veronica’s, a convent on the skids. The buildings are falling apart, there’s no money to rebuild the community, a visiting German nun is up to something nefarious late at night, and young Sister Agnes–a derivation from the movie Agnes of God–is having miraculous, and likely, fictitious visions that have attracted the interest of a Hollywood screenwriter.

It’s hard for Busch to stand out amidst the phenomenal comic cast. Julie Halston is the hard edged Sister Acacius who is steadily unraveling from a guilty conscience. Alison Fraser channels Marlene Dietrich cum Frau Blucher as Sister Walburga, and Jennifer Van Dyck is a snooty heiress prone to lapse into absurd, meandering reminiscences.   Busch’s deference to his co-stars is a triumph.  Everyone has their “moment,” and you find yourself rooting for everyone no matter what their bizarre motives.

Best of all is how the actors play off each other with perfect comic timing. A string of double entendre insults delivered to Sister Acacius (too dirty to repeat here) was a highlight. Good for full-body laughter.

2010 Releases – Hollywood Hits and Misses

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So this is a highly-skewed list of raves and roasts from a cranky movie-goer who has perhaps become a bit self-righteous about proper storytelling. I counted sixteen 2010 releases that I’ve seen so far this year, nearly all commercial films, I just haven’t had the time to keep up with the indies. Here are my three favorite and my three least favorite.

The Best

An excellent, clever family drama, the gist of which is two teens raised by a lesbian couple seek out their biological dad—a sperm donor—and discover something important amidst the chaos that ensues. No cheap sentimentality. The mothers aren’t perfect, and the bio dad is a particularly well drawn out guy who is at turns despicable and sympathetic.

The Social Network doesn’t qualify as an original story per se, but the filmmakers did something with a real life narrative that I really liked: letting the action speak for itself. There isn’t any fluffy “humanizing” of the characters, no clunky musical cues to tell the audience how it should feel. If you want to excavate the humanity of Mark Zuckerburg and his too-smart-and-too-rich-for-their-own-good college cohorts, you’re going to have to pick up a mental shovel yourself. Exactly what I think a good story should do.

On to lighter fare, the film adaption of Jeff Kinney’s middle-grade series was the funniest movie I’ve seen all year. The premise: a late-blooming, world-embattled 12 year old enters middle school and goes on a quixotic mission to achieve popularity. It’s high school movie stock and trade, but setting the story in the horror show of middle school opens up new, cringing possibilities.

The Worst

The 80’s film had woeful special effects, dully-imagined mythological characters and epically corny dialgoue. But like a Saturday morning cartoon, it was innocuous and oddly nostalgic.  It also told a coherent story.

The 2010 update had decent special effects but recast Perseus as a Jesus figure caught between Zeus (God) and Hades (The Devil). A waste of a spectacular ancient world setting. And way too earnest. Even Sam Worthington’s hotness couldn’t save the film.

Speaking of overly earnest, this “comedy” in which a junior record producer and a washed up rock star looking for a come-back discover what’s important in life through their unlikely friendship really disappointed. The film had more missed beats than a cardiac arrest.

In order for a story to work, it has to be believable or in the case of sci fi/ fantasy maintain a sense of internal logic.  So, in the future everyone needs organ transplants why?   No one can afford them but they’re getting them anyway, why?   They’ve figured out a way to create synthetic organs, but to control the deadbeats who are late with their monthly payments, they created a special repo force to brutally reclaim the organs instead of flipping a switch to deactivate them?  Ugh.