Get On The Bus

PREHISTORIC SABERTOOTH TIGER!

Today was a slice of little Benny heaven: warm temperatures, big dinosaurs and four very noisy buses. Spring fever hit me with a 2x4 this afternoon and sent Benny and I rolling down the sidewalk.

Our mission: the No. 8 bus to downtown Ann Arbor. Benny, who'd spent his entire naptime singing songs in the bedroom, was hyped up on apple juice and cookies. He rode in his stroller, eyes rolling, yelling "Bus! Bus Stop!" at the top of his lungs. Even after three years in San Francisco and one year in Prague, I still can't read a bus schedule properly. Somewhere a pack of map designers cackle madly as they sketch route drawings placing north on the bottom and east on the left. "This'll get her," they snicker.

But lo, a bus arrives precisely at 2:07 and we're on our way. The crowded bus forces us to sit near the back on the left-hand side and Benny now insists on those exact seats each time we board a bus. We stop at the bank, the post office, the book store, with Benny providing a running commentary like Howard Cosell. I just nod and try to remember that we wanted him to talk.

We stop for pastries at Cafe Felix -- well, I eat the pastries. Benny sneers at his blueberry muffin and demands Goldfish crackers. So I eat the muffin and the chocolate tart and the squishy jam thing. "Have another cracker," I tell Benny as I lick icing off my fingers.

Newly forified, we catch the No. 2 to the University of Michigan's natural history museum. It's dark and dusty and bereft of "hands on" educational strategies, but we like it. No kicky videos or foam dinosaur nests, but it's got some big mastadon skeletons and a giant freaky fish fossil with fangs and armored plates. Benny counts the toes on the allosaurus and stares at the triceratops skeleton half-buried in the sand, felled by a predator. "Look, it's sleeping," Benny says.

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The Land of Misfit Toys

If you click on the links to the right, you can learn about my two produced scripts. A 15-minute screenplay called "The Europa Society" was made in to a movie by Apprentice Films. It screened in Ann Arbor and Mt. Pleasant, both in Michigan.

The second is a 12-minute play called "The Video Game." This one is about two video game characters who stand around and chat while the gamer takes a break. Remember that old Looney Tunes cartoon, where the sheepdog and the coyote say "Hi, Frank" and "Hi, Ralph," then punch a time clock? Then the dog sits on a hill and the coyote tries to steal the sheep? It's kinda like that. Anyway, "The Video Game" will be performed June 24. I've got a director and a cast, and rehearsals start this month.

Usually when I think of my fiction projects, I often recall The Land of Misfit Toys from the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" TV show. Santa created this island for screwed-up toys with square wheels, strange habits or tragically misguided name choices (remember "Charlie in the Box?")

My toys hide in obscure computer files or crumpled boxes from Kinko's. I've got a short story called "Happy Burger" and a 10-year-old play script titled"The Bats From Hell." My one-act play "The Europa Society" lives as a 40-page stage play and a 15-page screenplay. My short play "The Video Game" wears three separate hats: one where the Russian sentry lives, one where he dies and one where nobody knows. Glowering over all of them sit my two novels: "Secret Soldiers" and "Escaping Olympus."

My efforts at writing a full-length script have failed miserably so far. The first, called "Wake Up Winslow," was about a brother and sister hosting a local morning television show. Their older brother talked them into the show, then promptly disappeared after the first day. After Scene Four, the script crawled into a hole and still refuses to come out. Sometimes a story is smarter than I am.

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Living Out of the Moment

New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Anna Quindlen recently wrote an essay titled “On Being a Mom”:

http://www.momsview.com/discus/messages/23/33816.html

I've got two separate copies in my email inbox so far, as various mothers weep over the words and forward the column to their 300 closest friends.

It is, of course, a lovely essay describing Quindlen's feelings about her three teenagers. I like her description of the independent people she raised, the now-obsolete parenting books she devoured, and the weirder mistakes she made.
(Thank God I'm not the only one who's ordered McDonald's from the drive-thru and driven off without the food.)

But I'm afraid Quindlen started to lose me with this quote:

“But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough.”

Now I'm the first to say “Gosh, yes, you gotta enjoy your children, or what's the point?” I'm having a good time programming my own little robot (er, son) with all my strange interests, from Bugs Bunny to Jupiter's moons. But when I find myself reading another parenting column that says “Live In The Moment,” I start to get a little testy.

Because at the moment Ron's working late and I have a cold and Benny's lying on the sofa screaming because he dropped one of his 4 million little Thomas trains. And somehow, imagining myself 20 years from now, weeping over a dusty shoebox filled with Thomas, Toby, and Harold the Helicopter isn't helping one bit. But I still dig the little red engine (James) out from under the sofa and help Benny build a bridge over the Crevasse of Doom (the space between the sofa cushions) and peace reigns once more. At least long enough for me to gulp some DayQuil.

One gal I know recently had the nerve to mention that she nurses her 2-year-old sometimes and frankly, she's getting sick of it. Immediately another mother began spouting how she'll miss nursing one day, she should enjoy this last part of her daughter's babyhood, etc. Suitably chastened, the first mother just nodded tiredly.

I myself felt unqualified to comment, not only because I didn't nurse my baby, but because I often celebrate Benny's milestones with almost indecent glee, stopping only short of ritual bottle-burning ceremonies.

So we mothers need to be a little cautious throwing that “live in the moment” line around. I can't help but feel its wisdom, but it needn't be another source of guilt. Every mother treasures something different with each child. I myself confess to an unhealthy attachment to Benny's tiny baby T-shirts. They no longer fit Benny, of course, so I put them on his stuffed animals, which make them look quite casual and sporty, in my opinion. And maybe I'll keep a few tiny trains - especially Toby, my favorite. Let's just say he's square.

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Welcome to My New Blog!

Thank you for following me to BabySpace's new home. I was enticed here by BlogSpot's cool layout and kicky little features. Hopefully, this new site will encourage me to post more often.

I've brought all my online diaries to this site, so feel free to browse posts describing our child-free days tooling around in George the VW Beetle. I plan to post pictures on old entries as well, so readers will have the chance to see the portraits produced by Benny's harrowing adventures at various studios.

Feel free to comment and give all kinds of advice about the blog. Let us boldly go where no blog has gone before.

CK

Culture Clashes

If any faithful readers have sent me an email lately, I must apologize for not responding. Cowardice is my only excuse --my Yahoo inbox is a scary place these days. I’m afraid to open it.

Two disparate groups have taken over, shunting aside friends, family and Viagra salespeople. Both groups love long conversations via email, and some folks get a little reckless with that “reply to all” button.

My playwriting colleagues favor lengthy discussions about theatre critics, recent stage productions and why Performance Network (Ann Arbor’s theatre company) won’t acknowledge our obvious genius. Mother’s group members like to discuss parenting articles, toddler vaccines, sleep issues and potty training.

Which is all fine, usually. The playwrights will launch a swarm of emails about staging Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” using little Honeybaked Hams one week, and the mothers will send a flurry emails about the dangers of Post-It notes the next. No problem.

But last week was difficult because both groups lost their minds at once. One playwright sent everyone an innocent opinion on the play “Proof,” about a girl who sacrificed college to look after her mentally ill father, a famous mathematician. The father dies, leaving the girl anguished and in limbo. Meanwhile, a playgroup mother sent out a list titled “You Were a Little Girl in the Seventies if …”

Chaos ensued. I received dozens of emails a day, just from these two groups:
_______________________________

“You were a little girl in the 70's if...

You owned a bicycle with a banana seat and a plastic basket with flowers on it.

You thought Gopher from Love Boat was cute …”

________________________________

“In Proof, not only do we wonder whether the ghost is a ghost or the personified thoughts of Catherine, the live person conversing with the ghost …”

________________________________

“Too fun! I remember playing with Strawberry Shortcake dolls, as well as her friends, Blueberry Muffin and Huckleberry Pie …”

________________________________
“Obviously, to make a point dramatically takes time. Dad's-ghost exposition, like extended narration, is a way that playwrights shorten the dialogue. Others are blatant
semiotics and simply scanting character development …”

________________________________


“I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder really bad and wore that Little House on the Prairie-inspired plaid, ruffle shirt with the high neck and I despised Nellie Olson! But I LOVED Bo Duke …”
________________________________

I don't think this is at all fair to Auburn's play. The scene between Catherine and Robert (where Robert is dead) is a very rich and complex interaction. It is true that in other scenes, Auburn's writing suffers from substituting "interrupted monologue" for true dialogue …”
_______________________________

“Oh yes! I got to see John Schneider at the Kalamazoo County Fair! My other childhood crush was Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains. I had his Teen Beat poster on my wall and practiced french kissing daily …”
________________________________

Um, maybe a little too much information there. You can see now why I twitched and cringed a little every time I saw that red “New Mail” signal. And I couldn’t just delete the stuff; buried in the dreck was information about one-act play festivals and upcoming playgroup dates.

So if you receive emails babbling about the haunting complexity of Kirk Cameron’s dialogue in a play with little hams, now you know why.

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Cue the Killer Robots

It's Sunday afternoon, Ron and Benny are napping, and I'm in my home office, trying to write.

I'm trudging through the second revision of my first novel, a science fiction story. Originally named "The Wanderers" (the word "planet" Greek for "wanderer"), it is now titled "The Secret Soldiers."

The Secret Soldiers are, of course, 10,000 killer robots chasing an accused criminal named Rodney Jackson. The robots were just a neat sidenote in the original draft, but their numbers grow with every revision, and now the damn things are beeping madly all over this latest draft.

I'm almost afraid to tell people I'm doing this, since the most common (and rational) response would be "You're still messing with that thing? Get a life -- you wrote it three years ago!" Well, yeah, I know.

The thing is, I'd like to send it to some book agents, and "Secret Soldiers" is nowhere near ready for that. First of all, it's too short: 70:000 words. It needs to be at least 10,000 words longer, and unless I want to include a list of names for all 10,000 killer robots, that means I have to write.

And for me, adding 10,000 words isn't as simple as typing up 40 more pages and calling it a day. When I did the first revision on this novel, then a 50,000-word draft, I cut 5,000 words out, then wrote 25,000 more. Gives me a headache just thinking about it. I added some new scenes between Ares (my villain) and Zodiac (Earth's Supreme Chairman, don't ask). Then I gave my heroine a 20-page stop at the planet Saturn ("the slum of the Solar System").

That's another reason I don't talk about this novel to people -- it makes me sound like a complete nutcase.

Anyway, I'm determined to send it out to some agents who claim to like this sort of thing. But I need to transform these messy pages into a polished, 80,000-word manuscript. (God, just thinking about these numbers makes my head hurt.)

It all sounds slightly insane, but it's got to be easier than reading the next book on my Military History Reading List (remember that?): "The Origins of War," by Donald Kagan.

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