spermbank dad: the graphic novel

Spermbank Dad Fred Astaire

Jamie my son is home from university! A good first-semester of freshman year. Mormon girlfriend "didn't work out." [happy face]. Changed in several small ways and one very big way, and I'm blown away by that big way:

He has hugely transformed his attitude [from hostility and resentment] toward the fact that his dad came from a sperm bank. Which is not, in fact, the truth, about his dad. Re Jamie's dad:

http://studionightshade.blogspot.com/2010/11/more-and-less-of-pater-unfamilias.html

[btw, a coherent way to read this serial blog of a well-intentioned liar is from earliest to recent.  coherent's not always fun, either, but I'll include backstory links where they seem helpful.]

Yet I'm glad he's forgiven me, even if he has  forgiven a lie that he thinks is the truth. I'll have to check A Mom's  Guide to Lying and Evasion, but I believe that a child's forgiving a mother for a transgression she lied about committing absolves the mother-transgressor. I do know that forgiveness makes the lied-to child feel better. That's like, you know, Buddhism for Dummies.

Here's how it happened.

In his graphic novel studio arts course, the portfolio assignment was to create a reality-based fictional family memoir. Btw, Jamie has real artistic talent so he was able to enroll in a junior-level art class. The older students--unconventional, multiple-piercing types--were bitching about having to find creative ways to cartoon their bourgeois, suburban  families.

Jamie said: "yeah, well my father came from a sperm bank. What am I supposed to do with that?"

BAM! Instant celebrity. Because he has a sperm-bank dad [SBD] Jamie becomes the uber unconventional It Kid on the university undergrad art scene. The pony-tailed artist prof decides to mentor him. This  prof--"Kirk"-- urges him to create a fictional graphic bio of his father as one that purports to be factual, so as to create a "meta-meta piece."

Jamie did and titled it: Stick Man. He got an "A." Kirk called Jamie a "wunderkind," which Jamie said he had to look up on his iPhone dictionary app.

Jamies's not sure if he's ready to let me see it, so I'm not pressing. I am, however, dying to see it. Has  Jamie genetically intuited anything about his real father? Like that he plays the harspichord. Or is an art dealer. Or that he was once the handsomest British man in London, and one who sketched a small pencil drawing of a younger me as a reclining nude reading a volume of Christina Rossetti poems.

Tomorrow,  Jamie and I are going to make the long drive to NYC  and stay at Thomas's place. When I meet with Helen the prodcuer, Thomas and his boyfriend are taking Jamie to see A Little Night Music; they scored an extra ticket.

I am feeling very happy.

And yes-- of course, of course-- I know that this protracted, sperm-bank father lie is an etchically-complicated mess of my own making. But there's a metaphorical truth to it, no?  and that Jamie wrote a fictional bio of his Stick Man father strikes me as also metaphorically authentic. The guy's never been in Jamie's life, and when it was time to pony up for college, he went and had a stroke, leaving me with a huge second mortage on my modest house.

Call me a cockeyed optimist--and that would be a first-- but I've got a big gut feeling that everything on the father-lie front is going to be okay now.

And that this marks the beginning of laying the living bones of the absent father to rest in a peaceful grave.







Big development with my screenplay

No brides allowed

Major news: interest in my script, my screenplay adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd [FFMC], which has, for several months, been off the radar of Helen, my producer. I’m calling her “my” producer because...


Monday night, I got an email from my producer with the words “interest” and “Miramax” in the same run-on sentence. Pretty amazing. However,  there’s a wrinkle. A crevasse, actually.


Helen hadn’t been returning my emails since late June, except the reply she sent on Labor Day, around 3:32 PM: “Believe me, if I move the script, you’ll be the first to know.” That was right after that she started work on a production in Nova Scotia.

Then there were unconfirmed reports—from my friend Thomas, my connection to Helen -- that her fiancé, Martin, had been running around in her absence. Apparently, Helen set up some kind of Wiki My Fiance [WMF]among her girlfriends. By Fashion Week, a rash of postings had appeared. These were followed by pics. Martin with a lot of  aspiring  models  with long skinny legs and designer dominatrix shoes. I’m not sure how much of that is true. The Wiki thing, I mean. It’s clear to me, from the my recent email exchange with Helen—Helen, my producer--that her engagement’s over.

This is what Helen wrote to me at 9:58 PM, Monday:

"Need revisions to FFMC interest Miramax. Working dinner? Dec 18? my place? Moved from LES to CPW."

I didn’t ask her about the move from the Lower East Side to Central Park West; we know what that means. And Helen and I are hardly friends; I’d never ask that question. In fact, I’m kind of surprised she invited me to dinner at her apartment. In nyc, the eating of food in another’s apartment is quite intimate. It makes one feel a strong urge to: pry. In the geographically desolate dwellscape I inhabit, natives invade each other’s feeding space with startling regularity. Different vibes for different tribes.

When I go to dinner at Helen’s, can I bring just a bottle of expensive wine? I won’t be expected to show up with a miniature Koons, will I?

In response to her email, of Monday, 9:58, I did ask, “What sorts of revisions do you have in mind?”

“Discuss over dinner.”

Me to her: “Looking forward! But how about general contours, locations of revision so I can be giving it some thought?”

“The ending,” she emailed back.

“A little more to go on?” I pressed, in reply.

“No marriage. Ending’s outdated. Bathsheba’s marrying Oak is just silly. Targeted demographic audience will hate it--kill it in previews. Discuss over dinner. Rack of lamb; thoughts?”

I thought: “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s a period piece. Even Jane Eyre got married. American girls, aged 19-36 believe strenuously in marriage. It’s Bridget Jones in a bonnet. What  next? Bathsheba becomes a single mother who moves with her daughter—Lulu or Liana-- to London to open an art gallery in Brixton?”

I did not write the foregoing [what a satisfying word, “foregoing”].

I wrote: “Sorry, am allergic to all lamb products. No other dietary constraints.”