my head on swimwear: a digression

We are way overdue
for a renaissance in
classic American swim caps

 I started swimming in October after a hiatus of 19 years--the Jamie Years. I was a competitive swimmer in college; it paid my tuition. I grew to hate swimming, swimmers, and swim meets. But I had to compete because I grew up in a family that kept unregistered vehicles in the brambly backyard, including a van in which my second cousin Stan lived once during the fall of 1973.

But I thought I'd try it for pleasure and it is, except  for this one thing. My advisee, Leah, a young woman with TMI/boundary issues, told me that some of the boys in the Yabba Dabba Doo fraternity make a point of swimming when I am in the pool to check out me and an ethnomusicalogist about my age and dimensions.

They call it: MILF Watch.

The ethnomusicalogist shifted her swim time to 7 AM. I can't do that early; it causes college competitive swimming flashbacks.

My solutions was to go on eBay and buy a collection of circa early 1960s swimcaps. I am hoping my swimcaps--like this one with its yellow petals and flower on the side and especially with the chin strap--will call to mind their grandmothers, and that a GILF Watch will  simply be too shuddery, too "that's just wrong," even for frat boys, who generally do not set their propriety-bar very high.

Serendipitously, however, I have discovered I adore my swimcaps which, unlike the newer generations  of thin, sleek caps, actually keep my hair DRY. And I have a lot of unruly hair. In the last few months I have ordered 7 from eBay. I've developed an eBay swimcap-porn compulsion.

Sometimes,  late at night, I just have to go out there online and take a swimcap peek. Just  you know, to release some tension.







Bathsheba doesn't live here anymore: 3 new endings to the script

Door #1: Jill Clayburgh: me!

Spending the weekend revising the ending of  Madding Crowd for Helen, my producer. That would be the recently unaffianced Helen who urges [read: demands] I change entirely my script's [and the novel's] end by ditching the marriage [see http://tinyurl.com/4qy368w]. Helen's vision: the film closes with our youthfully-widowed heroine Bathsheba as an independent, successful, content, and happily unmarried woman. Helen thinks this version will have much greater appeal to the targeted female demographic for this costume-drama chickflick. It's counter-intuitive to me but all I'm trying to do is sell this script, buy my way out of a life-sentence of university teaching, and fulfill my dream of living and writing in Manhattan. Once this was not a "dream" but an achievable plan until Jamie's biological dad had his stroke--the bastard, sorry I know, stroke is bad but I swear the bastard planned it-- and no tuition money nor Rossetti sketch came my way [see: http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk].

So here's what I've got going in the rewrite dept. Please, please, dear readers, weigh in. Vote now. comment.

Note: I won't insert  plot summary of FFMC, the novel but you may find one at my page, on right hand side: or simply go to: http://tinyurl.com/45aklaa. I believe it's worth the detour of 300 words, but it's your choice.

Door #1  Troy the presumed-dead husband secretly returns to Bathsheba [BE], who in a moment of weakness, has sex with him. When Boldwood sees Troy the next day strutting around BE’s farm, he shoots him, goes to jail. Shock: a few moths later, BE discovers she is pregnant. Oak the shepherd proposes; she declines but agrees that they will continue to enjoy a warm and often romantic relationship. BE raises a daughter with  strong, [pre]feminist values. Sometimes she and her daughter play duets on the piano. When last we see Bathsheba, Oak is working about her farm, her daughter is learning French from her governess, and Bathsheba mounts her horse and gallops out into the rolling Dorset countryside of her farm as the sun sets gently on the verdant landscape and the vibrant, matured but yet beautiful Bathsheba Everdene.

`

Door #2. Diane Lane:
Like, I wish!

Door #2. With Troy dead and Boldwood in jail, BE has had it. Oak's a pal but you know, not finally the guy you want at the end of the day. Day after day. And frankly, Oak still and will always think BE is the most marvelous and lively Victorian woman he'll ever meet, but as wife-material....well, he's thinking the prospect will be better in Canada. Sick of all the bad memories, BE sells the farm for a tidy profit. She travels to Italy, buys a fixer upper. This will be fairly compressed because it's going to be the end, not the premise, of the script. Thus we last see BE with a somewhat dilapidated structure, but an entire village of swarthy Italian men. In the final shot, a ripped Italian laborer introduces himself and the Tuscan sun sets over the verdant landscape and the vibrant, matured yet beautiful Bathsheba Everdene.

Door #3. Thelma and Louise

Door #3.  Frankly, Bathsehba's done up by all the unwarrantedly awful things that have happened to her. so when Troy shows up at the Xmas party and tries to spousal-rape her out by the stables, she pulls an exceptionally sharp letter-opener from her bag and hits his jugular. He dies. This may seem unlikely but if you think it's high on the unlikely scale, let me refer you again to the plot summary of the actual novel, on my Pages. The adrenaline of hate can turn a letter opener into a lethal weapon. Believing she has nowhere to turn, Bathsheba runs into the night, and, coming full circle to the film's start, arrives in the vicinity of her old aunty's, near the cliffs on the southern coast. It's late. She steals into her aunty's barn for rope. She leashes two sheep--ones who seems jejune and trusting, like Bathsheba was once, herself--and jogs with them to cliff's edge. Our final shot is BE, a sheep on either side of her, launching herself toward the glittering waters of the English coast. Her suicidal leap is presented--via rising strings and stunning cinematography--as a triumph.







'“Come fly with me': Vargas girl with PhD ISO Man with six-figure frequent miles account”: Changes to my online dating profile

And I subscribe to The Economist, too!

In the past six weeks, I’ve gotten hit on only three times on match.com. I have therefore decided--since last wondering aloud about the effectiveness of my profile [http://tinyurl.com/4sfch7t]—to post a picture and revise my responses to sound sassy with just a soupcon of the salacious [note the alliteration]. The abyssmality of the three prospects who contacted me prompted the changes.

One was a guy with no pic [like me] but no prose or stats, including marital status. Pass. 

The second was a man 78 miles away, my age, with joint  custody of two daughters, aged 4 and 7, from his second marriage. Pass.

The third was a math professor at my university, a man with whom I have bad blood: seriously infected blood. He didn’t know he was writing me, because of my nom de dating and lack of pic. In spring 2007, he complained, four times, to the Registrar, that I failed to adequately erase  all traces of words on the chalkboard in the classroom in which his Boring Math 324 class succeeded my perennially popular, “Elegant corpses in Victorian painting and poetry” course. I made some noises about harassment that were ignored.  The last day of the course, I let students out half an hour early and chalked a cartoon man on the board with a dialogue balloon that read: “Necrophilia. My favorite position.” Charges of character defamation were leveled against me, and some half-assed mediation committee called. In the end, no one could prove that the cartoon man with the owl-eye glasses,  bad comb-over, and high water trousers was not intended to be a representation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a painter who might justifiably be identified as harboring a penchant for necrophilia. I was exonerated although the pedagogical value of my cartoon was questioned.  I reminded the committed that I maintain the record for successfully getting our lit majors into Ivy League graduate programs. 

So a definite pass on the litigious, corpse-screwing math prof. And time to revamp my online image.

I looked at a few profiles of women my age to see what their profiles had that I needed. Answer: all had photos. Most had cleavage of varying exposures on display, and tight jeans paired with high heels or boots with high heels. None sported eyeglasses. They had clever tags lines, some with not unclever [our old friend, litotes!] double-entendres .

So above  are my new tag line and pic.

any thoughts? I mean, I would like to meet a guy with a sense of humor as well as frequent flyer miles to share.







The Family Romance

QT is not my 
son's spermbank dad,
but he he played him in
Jamie's Family Romance 
circa 2006

The art of parting isn't hard to master.


Yes it is.


Jamie left today to return to university over 800 miles away from this culture-forsaken university town where I teach. Letting go isn't good, it isn't healthy, it isn't part of the vast web of life and growth and change I said I signed on for with motherhood. I thought it would be easier to say goodbye than last August when I drove him to university for the start of his freshman year, but it was worse. The house whispers the lonely sound of him not being in it. The undressed, discarded Christmas tree sits in the back yard, a few strands of tinsel valiantly holding on.


Transitions aren't my strong suit.


But Jamie's beginning to find resolution to his anger and awkwardness and shame over being the offspring of me and a tube of anonymous sperm from Seattle, which is not, of course, the truth of his paternity but the lie I perpetuated as part of my devil's bargain with his biological father. [http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk ]. Jamie's experience of penning his spermbank father graphic novel last semester [http://tinyurl.com/4jowk4p] has been, I think, instrumental in this emotional progress. It's started to shift something between us and in a good way. I think that's why it was harder to say goodbye this time; last August, he was mostly pissed off--in a repressed, meaning the worst, sort of way,  and tired of me and ready to blow town.


Two nights ago he let me see [ok, i badgered] a chapter called, "My Family Romance"--a reference to Freud's developmental theory that at a certain period, a child imagines his parents are not his real ones but adoptive ones and he fantasizes about being the biological child of parents more famous or rich, or even of royal status. [Aside: I don't think I've mentioned that Jamie was certified "gifted" in 2nd grade, a label that worried me, tho he is uncontestably an intellectual prodigy]. You know, it's the stage when you're maybe 12 and one day you think, "Man, these freaks at the dinner table cannot possibly be my real parents."  


In Jamie's chapter, "My Family Romance," he identifies three stages, from age 9-14, during which he fantasized that his real father was, and in this order: R.L Stine, then Barry Manilow [troubling, I know, but let's not go there], then Quentin Tarantino. I wish I could include his pages here. They're every bit as good as Chris Ware, I swear. But I can't; not all my principles have been compromised.


"Was that the last one? The Quentin Taratino Dad?"I asked him.


"Yes. Alright, no. A few years ago I fanatazied that my spermbank father was Joel and Ethan Coen."


"Honey, Joel and Ethan? That's two men. Two separate human beings."


"Never seemed that way to me."







The Morning Apres L'Express: chagrinned Postlude

Mary Gordon impersonating me, for a change

I got up early the morning after my 11:05 PM l'exit from L'Express en chalance.  I headed out to the Union Square green market with Jamie to hunt for interesting food before heading north by northwest to our home in the barren tundra where iceberg lettuce is considered a delicacy.

As we were walking around the stalls on the Square, I was worried, in a small way, about running into Jack Manning, who'd told me he lived in this neighborhood. That was LM's real name, Jack Manning; I looked at his card the previous night, just before I popped a xanax, which I take when I feel the onset of insomnia. Aside: "xanax" is both palliative a and a palindrome; how many things can you say that about?

Jamie was holding a couple food-stuffed satchels, and I was paying for a $13 jar of Maine wild blueberry jam when I heard a man's voice say, "Mary?" At first, I didn't heed it because I'm not used to being addressed as "Mary," largely because Mary is not my name. Then I felt a tap at my elbow. Anxiety spike. I turned.

It was the bartender from L'Express, the one Jack Manning christened Rolf. The one who overheard me tell Jack Manning that my name was Mary Gordon [http://tinyurl.com/4kprd34].

"I'm Danny--from L'Express last night? Mary, I have a huge favor. This is my grandmother," Danny said, gesturing toward a miniature old woman who looked like an apple-head doll sitting in a wheelchair.  "Nana loves your novels."

The arm of Nana moved toward me, as if being lifted by an invisible crane--one with a stoned operator--, with the intention of shaking my hand, and then suddenly she let her arm flop down. "You're not Mary Gordon! I've seen her picture a hundred times. What the hell? " Her surprisingly robust voice was full of  venom. Jamie came to my side, looking like he was about to do or say something regrettable. Apple-head doll granny looked at Jamie and said, "And who the hell are you? Her son, Flash Gordon?" Impressive geriatric wit or not, nobody talks to my kid that way.

"What, you think there's only one woman in the English-speaking world named Mary Gordon? you think I go around impersonating Mary Gordon the novelist to impress bartenders and their grandmothers?" I turned to Danny. "And, remind me, was I talking to you when I said my name?" Danny looked at his feet. "C'mon, let's get away from these loons," and I took Jamie by the arm and headed him toward 17th street.

"Wow, tough-asses momma. I'm impressed."

"Just momma bear protecting her cub."

"Yeah, except you're five feet tall and I'm six-two, however that happened. Did you tell someone your name was Mary Gordon?'

"What, now you're going to accuse me of going around impersonating famous people?"

"Mom, there was that time we were in London. I was, like, nine. And that woman came up to us at the Victorian Albert Museum--"

"Victoria and Albert."

"Whatever. And she asked if you were Jill Clayburgh and you said yes and you autographed her museum map?"

"All right--I forogot about that. I don't know what got hold of me. I just wanted to see what it felt like, for one little stinking, little puny moment, to be a celebrity. It didn't damage you for life, right? We laughed about it afterwards, no?"

"Yeah, but it was really embarrassing when you were doing in and the lady was patting me on the head and asking me what movie of yours what my favorite, and I said Star Wars because I got nervous and didn't know what was going on, and, you know, it was kinda creepy."

"Geze, I'm sorry, bud. I should have considered you. Bad-mom move."

"It's okay. I recovered."

Sometimes, it's like your kid forgets all the wonderful stuff from birth to age seven, and the they develop the faculty for long-term memory of parental screw-ups.

 "So, hey, Mary, how does  it feel?' Jamie asked.

"What feel?"

"Being a celebrity? How does it feel to a celebrity?"

"It feels like impersonating a celebrity."

"I bet that's what being a real celebrity feels like a lot of the time, too."

Man, that was quick sardonic thinking; I shfted into an I'm-a-good-mom too moment."

"How'd you'd get so smart, Jamesie?"

He shrugged. "Natural selection, I guess."







My nom de bistro: or, what happened at L'Express

It just came out...

I felt the tiniest bit of hesitation as I exited the cab and walked into L'Express. But, perhaps fortified by just having dined with "my producer," I swept past the gaunt-girl-man-bait-hostess to make my way toward to bar. In fact, I'd say I brushed her off with considerable nonchalance. Aside: I find nonchalance a marvelous word, one for which there surprisingly is no back-formation [to refresh your memory  of how neologisms are created by the process of  back-formation, see: http://tinyurl.com/4og47e

     I spotted two seats at the bar; I'd have to move fast. The place was packed. Each seat was next to a man of an age that I could, without sacrificing my so-called dignity, sit next to and offer some comment that might lead to conversation, though I have never been good at initiating such social exchanges. Except at academic conferences, which are the only venues where I've had sex since my son was born [I prefer not to count a bit of mis-managed foreplay in the parking lot of a bowling alley, the details of which sometimes appear, unbidden, during my bouts of insomnia: see http://tinyurl.com/49wop9p.] However, at an academic conference, a sexy ice-breaker would be: "I'm fascinated by your presentation on the erotics of the marketplace in adventure stories for boys published in 1890s periodicals. I'd love to hear more."  Not likely to elicit the illicit at a bistro bar on Park Avenue South.

     But  the worst that could happen was I'd go and get all self-conscious, speak in monosyllables, blush, and leave fast. No, actually, the worst that could happen would be that whatever came out of my mouth would go unnoticed, or worse-worst, be assiduously ignored. But no one ever died from being ignored by a man, right? I mean, the last time I checked, I still had a pulse

     I made a quick assessment: one  guy was wearing a dark blue suit and cuff links, and the other a faded, marine blue Lacoste polo shirt with a frayed collar. I stepped toward the suit but--foiled!--a thirty-ish blonde in a silk teal tank top took the seat, obviously rejoining Monsieur du Cuff-Links. I bee-lined to the latter.

     "Is someone sitting here?" I asked the surprisingly attractive, frayed-collar man sitting next to the now singularly-empty bar stool. He looked at the empty seat and then at me, cocking his head sideways. 

     "I don't see anyone. Do you?" He smiled. It was a great smile, the kind where the lips curl upwards on both sides, creating parentheses around the mouth. I like parentheses; they're little whispers. His mouth had just whispered a smile at me.

     "No, I don't see anyone, but these progressive trifocals lens I'm wearing are new," I said, tapping them so as to display my nails painted, for good luck, in  "chick flick cherry" [OPI; you can confirm the existence of the color], "and I don't quite trust them yet." 

He tapped the seat in time to the music. "Can you see what I'm doing?" he asked. Then that smile again.
     I feigned a squint: "Tap dancing?"

     The smile laughed. "This seat's been reserved for you." So I took it. He waved over the bartender--a sylph-like man in a rather severe, short double-breasted jacket. 

     "Madame?"
      Hmmm. Another red wine would definitely stain my teeth, which might already be magenta: I don't carry a purse mirror. I ordered a Bailey's with ice on the side.

     Then I sat there and he sat there and it felt awkward and he checked his iPhone and made an enigmatic expression, so I checked my iPhone and tried to come up with another progressive-trifocal-lens witticism but couldn't. We simultaneously put our iPhones away and smiled similar, "well, then" smiles. 

     The human volume escalated as a large, smugly noisy,  group of well-heeled recent MBA-types entered and the bartender, as if on command, raised the volume of the music a notch or two. Lacoste Man leaned over and asked something roughly like, "do you live in the neighborhood," and, in order he might hear my response,  I leaned in closer  and said, "not exactly," then wondered if the chocolates coupled with the Bailey's were neutralizing my lamb breath, which I worried might be a turn-off to Lacoste-Man, whom I'll acronymize  LM, pronounced "lamb"--a not unhopeful [litotes yet again!] association for me.
     The bistro noise subsided some, and we were able to exchange a few halting bits of back and forth, with me deflecting questions so that I might ask about him. As best I could make out, he'd been involved in managing hedge funds, the phrase "hedge funds" appearing in sentences with words like "meltdown" and "crisis" and "downsize" and "severance package." I told him I was a screenwriter, and left out the professor part, "for now," I told myself. We talked mostly about the crowd in the room, inventing stories about this or that person. LM dubbed the bartender: Rolf. It felt conspiratorial. In the fun way.
     The bartender came over and asked if I'd like another Bailey's and I looked at LM, as if somehow this were his call, and he said "what time is it," and I replied: "10:48." LM looked at his watch and said, "How did you do that? it's exactly 10:48. You didn't even look at your watch. That spooky."
     "I don't wear a watch. I always know the exact time plus or minus two minutes, except when I travel to London." This is, in fact, an idiot-savant type skill I actually possess.
     "London! Dammit, I have to leave, damn, and I am genuinely sorry that's the case. I have a call I must make to London. Have to.  and..." He put his hands to his ears to indicate the impossibility of phone conversation in this milieu. "I have very much enjoyed this," and he handed me his card as he pulled on his pea coat. 
     "Me too and I feel foolish but I don't have a card to give to you in return," I told him. Which is true: how many professors carry business cards? He looked like he wasn't sure whether I was lying, which is just my ironic fate, no? To be truthful and thought to be lying. 
     "At least, tell me your name. You must be Irish."
     At the very moment I was about to say my name, a woman about my age---whose look, it must be said, bordered on rich and professionally-accomplished and sexually  available--caught LM's eye: in a nano-second, there was contact, possible mutual acknowledgement, then a quick turning away. But it happened so fast. Maybe I imagined it but something got me really confused. Was he a hedge fund loser who works the bar, and I--with my blather about my script and my producer--was his next target? Was the woman across the bar a mirror in which was reflected my "After" image?
     "My name?"
     "If you have one, yeah?" 
     "Mary. Mary Gordon." The bartender looked at me, trying to not look impressed. However, LM didn't appear to connect "Mary Gordon" with the well-known writer, whose novel, Spending, I was then reading. He said merely, "Mary Mary Gordon, I hope to see you again here and I promise not to run off this rude way next time. Email please when you're in the neighborhood...."
     He paused for a second. "Has anyone ever told you that you look very much like Jill Clayburgh?"
   The compliment made me kind of toasty in my capillaries [and I have been told for years I look like a younger Jill Clayburgh]  but as I glanced across the bar, I saw that woman again, eyeing him. "Narrowly," I would have to characterize her eyeing, much as I hate cliches. And he seemed to be studiously avoiding eye contact [why do romantic glances happen as cliches?].   Something felt "up" between them. But I don't get out of the Snow Belt much; maybe this was just urban ocular behavior.
     "I mean, of course, Jill Clayburgh when she was younger," he continued.  And now it just sounded suave--suave in the sense of cheap hair products.
     "And still alive?" I replied. The parentheses turned into brackets.  "Well, I haven't seen post-mortem photos, but yes, I was thinking of the beautiful Jill Clayburgh in "An Unmarried Woman." He nodded and left. I looked over at that woman but she had her back to bar and was talking on her cell phone. It was 11:03 and all I wanted was to be back at Thomas's apartment, making hot cocoa for Jamie when they all returned from the play.
     I paid my now fawning bartender for the Bailey's, and left L'Express with considerable chalance. 







The Voice of My Brain on Insomnia: A Digression

Counting sheep is an asinine way to combat insomnia

"Can't sleep. Thought tonight would be different. Is that my pulse racing? racing. Like NASCAR--ha! joke. wanna sleep, wanna sleep. Breathe. It's okay. I'll just be extra tired tomorrow. Shitfuck. I'm supposed to get up super early tomorrow--finish that quadrennial self-evaluation. Maybe I'll just say: 'I suck; year after year.' Can't sleep. Can't sleep. Can't sleep. Hot pillow; flip; better. What was the name of that Dusty Springfield song? My head feels like a bowling ball. Always liked bowling as a teenager. Bowling hip in Manhattan now. Out  here in provinces, it's still just downmarket. Waaay down. Remember: never ever, under penalty of self-induced death, tell anyone how I joined that 'Lovers Lane' singles bowling league when Jamie was 8. Oh god. Bad. Bad. Bad. I'm so tired. Tired of waiting. Tired of waiting for you--oooh--oooh. The Kinks. I was a lonely soul, I had nobody till I met you. Stop. Stop the song lyrics. Starting to freak. Ok, breathe. No one dies from insomnia. Is that true? What about insomnia as little-recongized secondary cause of shit? Like stroke. Heart attack. Renal failure. Is 'renal' kidney or liver? I used to love pate. Why no more? Ah, remember; puked pate my first trimester with jamie. Gray puke with still-intact capers. 'We that are true lovers run into strange capers'--god, what shakespeare's that from? Much Ado? no, no. So much shakespeare i've forgotten. Those were some strange capers on that pile of puke, though; I remember those--phew! 'Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade. But doth suffer a sea-change. Into something rich and strange.' Yessss. Nailed it. The Tempest. Memory's labor not all lost. Just sea-changed...." 





tinsel town: a screenplay update

lambing it up on CPW

I haven't had a chance to post about my dinner with the movie producer, just before Xmas. Aside: I prefer "Xmas" to "Christmas." It's universalist, generous. As in: "At Xmas we celebrate the birth of x: you, me, my god, your god, a variable algebraic god. I also enjoy uttering it: 'Ex-Mus.’” That said, I’m quite glad we’re now at the Exeunt Ex-Mus moment.

So: My Dinner With Helen, the film producer. It started out very strange—Stephen King strange—but I’m happy to report that it ended on a more promising note. Complex but at least not nightmare inducing.

For dinner, Helen served a bloody, bleeding really, rare rack of lamb. I couldn’t decide if she merely hadn’t read my email about my [imaginary] lamb allergy, or if she were establishing herself as Alpha Woman in the Room [AWR].  See previous post for my lamb-allergy backstory. For the origins of the apparent lamb leitmotif of My Serial Life, see  http://studionightshade.blogspot.com/2010/10/three-men-and-sheep-with-gas-problems.html

Helen staged the lambfest in her three-story brownstone in the 90s, CPW. When I handed her a $37 bottle of Cab, she stuck it on a deep kitchen window skill, without even taking it out of the festive gift bag I’d picked up at Duane Reade. By the end of the meal, I still wasn’t sure if she was hosting me, or roasting me [although the lamb was succulent, and the mint-remoulade mashed potatoes haunting]. She was, in a word, lambed-up and bitched-out. Okay, that’s two words; or four words depending upon how you reckon compound adjectives; of five if you count the conjunction, which I see no reason to do.

After we cleared the dishes [“we’ll leave those for Irenka--tomorrow’s one of her days,” she waved me away from rinsing them off to put in the dishwasher], and had our espressos in hand,  Helen said, “Now, let’s discuss that ending. I love the story. Terrific scenes; beats not bad for a novice. Needs work, of course. But I’ve read the novel--scanned it but enough to get the story--and been through your script twice now and you’re right—it’s complete chick flick material.” I knew there was a contrarian conjunction coming….

“But the marriage.  Doesn’t work. Won’t work.  Don’t buy it. Bathsheba deserves a lot better than the fucking shepherd. She’s earned the right to choose to be single, to enjoy her hard-earned success.”


Retorted I: "But by the end, he's not a shepherd. He's her equal. She couldn't have earned that hard-earned success without him. He saved her flock from farting to death" [see above the link to my "sheep with gas problems" posting].


"That's hardly Mr. Darcy," Helen said, invoking the Jane Austen man I most hate. She continued:  "After Oak borrowed money to buy a flock of sheep, they all jumped over a hedge and died. When I think Oak, I think: Loser. Loser. Loser. If Bathsheba had married him and his mortgaged sheep, she'd have been stuck in a life of penury." I thought what a fine word choice "penury" was,  but resisted my impulse to compliment her on her diction.


"I don't mean to sound like a pedant, Helen, though it's pretty much what I get paid modestly to be, but the sheep didn't jump over a hedge. The untrained sheepdog herded them off a cliff because Oak got lazy and didn't pen the dog for the night. But that's what so cool about the later scene where Oak saves her sheep. Because she screwed up too, by not penning them up properly. And it's cool because that's the moment when Bathsheba and Oak become equals."


"You're telling me the big warm and fuzzy moment happens over a bunch of farting sheep?"


"That's where it starts. But obstacles keep them apart for the next, like what, 50 minutes?  But, yes, the sheep-fart scene is a big plot point or whatever they're called in that Syd Field book you told me not read but that I read anyway."


Helen shook her head, musingly. "Filming all those sheep. Dogs, easy. Herds of cattle stampeding, cinch. Monkeys in the jungle. Snakes in the desert. All fine. But sheep. Christ. You can't train a group of sheep to lie down and fart."


"Too bad, because you could get a group of men to lie down and fart on command without even having to train them."


"Brilliant! I could hire a bunch of men. Extras. Non-SAG. Put them in sheep suits, and make them writhe around in a field of clover, farting to death." It was a satisfying, albeit mis-testeronic in spirit, comical image that made us laugh for a good spell.


"Okay, but seriously, Helen. Back to the Bathsheba-Oak marriage. It works. And the twenty-to-thirtysomething, chick, ticket-buying public will love it for this simple reason: Oak is loyal. Loyal. Not Loser. Loyal. These girls--okay young women--are not fighting the battle for R-E-S-P-E-C-T  that my generation was. Men respect us, you know, give or take. I'm a professor. You're a producer. We get respect."


I had my professorial mojo working now.


"And these younger women--like you-- get respect, professionally. But from the dispatches I've gotten from the battlefield, they're  not getting a lot of loyalty. Or fidelity." And in that moment, I thought: shit. If my words were in a cartoon dialogue balloon, I could have just sucked them back in. Poof; erase. Because one thing that had not come up in our evening of small talk was Helen's break up with her two-timing, Fashion-Week Horndog [FWH] finace [see: http://tinyurl.com/23tufyf]. I'd forgotten about the bastard.

As soon as I said, "fidelity," Helen put her fingertips [lovely nails, bordering on a lurid, shade of pink] to the now-furrowed space between her wheaten-colored eyebrows [she has naturally blonde hair--stunning] and began to massage it, and then—shock and dismay—she started weeping: dry-eyed but the whispery sound was unmistakably one of sadness. Then she drew in one of the longest breaths I’ve ever witnessed, gave her eyebrows a little realigning and said: “You’ll have to change the ending. No marriage.”


I don’t mean to suggest it was exactly like the moment in Misery when Kathy Bates makes James Caan burn his manuscript, but I intuited that if I failed to push back now and decisively so, somewhere down the road I’d get hobbled.  Fortunately I didn’t have enough time to over-think things, a particular talent of mine. A decisive, theatrical doppelganger of me took over.

"Listen, Helen," I said, making sure, on the word, "listen," to move my right hand forward, demitasse cup in hand,  "you can't seriously—seriously--consider undertaking a period-piece adaptation of Thomas Hardy and eliminating the marriage at the end. Not as a film of substance.  It’d be a joke, like one of those Jane Austen vampire books that keep getting published.”

“God,” Helen’s face assumed the look of a child being forced to eat a loathsome foodstuff as she spoke, “I hate Jane fucking Austen. The books. The movies. The spin offs. What’s wrong with me?” 

“You hate Jane Austen,” I answered, “because, despite what everyone has told you, it’s a very thin gruel she serves up. She makes dumb people feel smart and cultured. She’s an easy adaptation. Pulling off Hardy—that’s another matter entirely. Do that and you are: It.”

Nodding her head, almost joyously, Helen got up and brought over a  box of Teuscher champagne truffles.

“I believe you. But would you at least, if only as an exercise, draft an alternate ending, one in which Bathsheba chooses not to marry Oak the shepherd but instead . . .  well, does something that makes her rejection of marriage the happy ending?” Helen extended the box of truffles to me on the phrase, “happy ending.” I took two.

“Fair enough but I have to warn you. After years of skepticism about marriage and a lot of pride in being a single--and I mean never-married single—mother, my sense of what constitutes a 'happy ending' is under reassessment.  I’ve been thinking maybe marriage is—and I can’t believe I’m saying this shit—a happy ending after all. But gimme a few weeks to wrap my head around the end of the script. I’ll try it as an exercise. Who knows. Maybe I've had it right all along about marriage and defeat. Maybe Bathsheba could be an academic like me.” I shuddered visibly.

“How’d a cynic like you end up a professor of Victorian novels? And how’d you end up a never married mom back when...” Helen, I should note, is over fifteen years younger than I.

I took a third truffle from the box. “Hours. It’d take hours.”

“Next time, then. By 9:30, I’m done with my day. I’m up at 5:15, have my spinning class at 6.  We'll meet in early February. You’ll have the redrafted ending by then?”

So sometime before Valentine’s Day, I’m to have axed Bathsheba’s marriage to Oak. Which is richly ironic, considering that Bathsheba’s sending a Valentine with the words “Marry Me” to Boldwood started the complicated twining of the romantic plot threads of FFMC.

When I got in the cab her doorman flagged for me,  rather than give him Thomas’s address, I surprised myself by saying, “I’m going to L’Express. Park Avenue South and 20th.”  It was early. Jamie and the fellows were planning a light snack after the play.  It was New York. At Ex-Mus. Why not sit at the bar and have a nightcap? The very word "nightcap" sounded thrilling, if a tad dated.  And why not perchance  talk to a male stranger?  Flirt even.

All of which I did.

But that’s for the next post.