Tag Archives: playwright

Just the Kind of Cat I Like!!

August 6, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis 2 Comments

Yes, I like my kitties intense, gang. Cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking cats, with those ice blue eyes that have all sorts of unsettling stuff written all over them. [If you’re reading this on my web page and not on your phone, the word cut off at the bottom, up there, is ‘intense.’ — Ed.]

I forgot to mention that, yesterday, I bought my cats some organic catnip. Now that Daddycakes is no longer with us (sadly), I realized that I can have catnip in the house again. Back when I had 2 male cats, the cat fights were off the charts when the catnip came out, so I had to stop buying it. But last night, boy, were there some stoned kitties around here.

The cats have tons of toys, but only a couple of them are the kind that you can stick catnip in. Here is their favorite:

Favorite catnip toy! A soaking, slobbery mess right now…

Okay.

Well. This morning had all the earmarks of a perfect morning. I’m hoping the whole day will follow suit. I haven’t actually looked into my astrology forecast or anything, but it just feels like something huge is either shifting or has shifted in my inner world.

I don’t just feel “happy;” I feel like I’m beginning to understand my life in cosmic proportions.

I don’t think it stems from drinking about 2 ounces of kombucha yesterday (see last night’s post). Seriously, though, I do think that my buying all that stuff yesterday was part of some sort of underlying shift that’s going on.

I also started a new yoga routine a couple of nights ago. (No, not kundalini or tantric. Honestly, if I included sex in every area of my life where I wished to include it, I would get absolutely nothing done.) (Plus, you know, making some sort of meditative practice to open my sexual energy — Jesus Christ. That would be sort of scary. It’s not like I’ve ever made a habit of blocking it.)

But I did change my yoga routine and it was noticeably effective. And by “effective,” I’m not sure what I really mean; just that my mind was different after I did that.

And now wanting all this new food (mostly beverages, apparently) in my life… I don’t know.

When I woke up this morning, I thought fleetingly about that older guy again, from when I was 14, but my thoughts immediately progressed to realizing that 45 summers ago was also when Greg died (on August 27th). I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t yet affixed that number to it.

And, as an aside, it could very well be that I forgot about that older guy until now, because Greg’s death obliterated everything else in my world. I know the older guy was around for the whole summer, even though I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, but I think that once his brother was out of prison, they all got construction jobs somewhere else and moved away.

But I was thinking this morning about Greg. Not really able to process what being dead for 45 years means when he was only 15 when he died. I’ve been to his grave a few times since moving back to Ohio. It’s about an hour’s drive from where I am now. I’m not sure if I’ll go visit this month or not. The last time I went, I saw that his dad had died now, too. There was a space between him and his dad and this morning, I was wondering if his mom is going to be buried between her husband and her son. And then I wondered, at what point would I visit his grave and then find his mom there, also?

It is just so weird how life just goes on. I don’t even try to process it because I just can’t. I examine everything, you know; I ponder. I can’t ever seem to stop doing that, but it’s more to look at how certain people or situations made me behave. How they made me feel, which made me behave a certain way.

And then, you live long enough, and you realize that nothing really mattered that much, or as much as you thought it did, because Time passed and everything changed, and then changed again, and then changed again. So I think the story that gets told is who we are from moment to moment. No one experience, no matter how life-changing or life-shattering at the time, is ever the definitive moment; it never truly defines who you are, even though it feels like it does. Eventually, if you live long enough, a deluge of Time passes and all sorts of defining experiences come and go.

I’ve also noticed that when people lose either their spouses or their long-time companions, it can wildly change who they become in life. I’ve seen that happen to quite a few of the men in my family, in very different ways. But the unifying thing underlying it was that the “other” died and it was clear that the man had sort of put his life on hold throughout the whole relationship, and that the death of the partner led to almost overwhelming freedom.

It can be hard for a family to see that, you know? I, being who I always am — a huge believer in emotional freedom — have always supported the men’s choices and usually got everyone else in the family pissed off at me.

My biological grandmother (my birth mom’s mom) was always at odds with me. I knew her for about 30 years before she died, and through most of that time, she wasn’t speaking to me for one reason or another.

The worst event was when my aunt died (her sister).

My uncle — that aunt’s husband –had always been so incredibly kind to me. Just off-the-charts kind. In the early days of knowing my birth mom, it was very hard for me to deal with the fact that she refused to tell me (or anyone, ever) who my dad was. I really, really, really wanted to know.

My uncle took me aside late one summer night, and said, “I wish I could help you. I honestly don’t know who your dad is. If I knew, I’d tell you in a heartbeat, no matter who got upset with me.”

And then after my aunt died, my uncle called me on the phone to tell me a little story.

It turned out, he’d had an illegitimate daughter of his own before he’d married my aunt. He knew he was the girl’s father, and he tried to have a relationship with the girl, but my aunt refused to allow it. So he lived there in the same town with the girl as she grew up.

The girl knew “that’s my father,” and he knew “that’s my daughter,” but they weren’t allowed to even speak to each other or my aunt would have a fit. And when she’d married my uncle, she was a widow with 2 young kids — her husband was a race car driver who got killed in a drag race crash. And my uncle raised my aunt’s 2 kids, and she deprived him of ever being able to know his own daughter.

When my aunt died, the girl — then in her early 40s — read about it in the newspaper and straight away, she finally went to visit her dad, you know? All above board and out in the open. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” right?

Wow, was the family up in arms that she did that. And it was even worse to them that my uncle welcomed his daughter with more than open arms: He bought a brand new Cadillac, let his diabetes go, and had a love affair, right out in the open, with his daughter.

Back then, cars didn’t always have that arm rest in the middle of the front seat, and when they’d drive around town in that new Cadillac, my uncle and his grown daughter would sit right up close together while he drove, like they were lovers, and it pissed the whole town off.

And I was the only one who was okay with that. I just thought that was the fucking coolest thing. My aunt deprived those two of everything that could have been normal between them for their whole lives. And so it was all coming out in the wash. (At the time, I was still a singer-songwriter in NYC and I wrote a song about it: “In this car of my old man’s/we run as fast as the racing wind…”)

My grandmother, of course, stopped speaking to me because I was “on my uncle’s side.” But my uncle would call me on the phone to talk to me about how he’d felt about everything — for all those years. How much he loved his daughter. How it killed him to never be able to even wish her a Merry Christmas or a Happy Birthday, or to even be allowed to acknowledge her when he saw her in the supermarket, where she worked when she was in her teens.

Eventually my uncle landed in the hospital because he let his diabetes go, and then he died soon after. But one time when he called me from his hospital bed, he said: “My daughter has something very important she wants to tell you.” So he put her on the phone with me.

At that point, I was still in my 20s, so she was a lot older than I was. And I knew that she and my uncle weren’t just having a love affair — I knew they were incestuous, too. They were doing it. And it did not bother me one bit. To me, they were adults, making their own choices. And so she gets on the phone with me, while she’s literally lying on the hospital bed next to my uncle — her dad — and what does she tell me? She told me who my father was.

She was a little older than my mom, but they’d gone to the same school when my mom got pregnant with me, and for all those years, she knew who “the father of Cherie’s baby” was. And that night, when she told me who he was, was the first time she learned that I was that baby.

If you remember a night about 30 years ago, when it felt like the planets stopped revolving in their orbits for a moment and the stars sort of exploded — that would have been the night she told me that over the phone: Who my father was. At last. He had a name. He existed. The name I had waited a lifetime to hear – I now knew it.

That alone, helped my uncle die happy, because he really, really did want me to know who my dad was. He thought that it wasn’t fair of my mother to have never told the guy that he was a dad, that he had a daughter in the world.

So anyway. Death creates peculiar and unexpected stories, even though the heartbreak that comes along with it is real. I’ll decide in a few weeks if I want to go back to visit Greg’s grave. Part of it is that I just feel he is so long gone from that grave, you know? 45 years, people. And he was only 15 when they put him in there, and in life, he was always up and out and looking for trouble. I’m guessing that death didn’t change him much.

Okay. This morning, appropriately enough, the music was all about Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now.” However, I actually like Neil Diamond’s version better. So I’m gonna leave you once again with a song from Rainbow.

Thanks for visiting, gang. I gotta get back to the rewrites on the play. (Oh, and Nick Cave sent out a new Red Hand Files newsletter so I gotta go read that!!!) I love you guys. See ya.

“BOTH SIDES NOW”

Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
You leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

c- 1967 Joni Mitchell

Miracles Sort of DO Happen!!

August 5, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis 4 Comments

I’m not sure how they managed it, but the United States Government delivered my new passport today and the hideous passport photo that was taken of me — the one that surpassed in hideousness my driver’s license photo — no longer looks quite so hideous!!

It’s still not a photo that I ever want anyone to see, but it looks better than it did before because now it has a bunch of squiggly blue lines running through it. I guess this is just one of the reasons why it’s great to be an American. The Government runs a bunch of squiggly blue lines through your face when you least expect it and then little miracles happen.

Well. On another topic.

I tried kombucha for the first time today.

For a very long time, I have thought about trying it but it just sounded so disgusting that I thought it would make me gag. Here are some possible side effects of kombucha:

If contaminated, side effects include stomach problems, yeast infections, allergic reactions, jaundice, nausea, vomiting, head and neck pain, and death.

That’s pretty exciting, right? How many other drinks, if contaminated, can say that?

However, the kind of kombucha I am always looking at and not buying is sold in the refrigerated health-drink aisle at the store, not homemade stuff. Probably not contaminated or I would have seen the horrific reports by now. (However, the mass-produced bottle is covered in those Sanskrit-looking symbols that look like you should either meditate while drinking it or practice yoga — hopefully kundalini or tantric yoga, but I’ll have to get back to you on that.) (Yes! I’m always looking for reasons why sex is absolutely required in every area of my life. My beverages, my yoga, etc., etc.)

I just now looked online to see again what the benefits of kombucha are, and I immediately saw a blurb from Web MD that claims that, when taken by mouth, it is safe for most adults.

So then I thought, oh god, don’t tell me people do kombucha enemas…

So I looked that up and it turns out: sure they do!! Why wouldn’t they??!!

Jiminy Christmas.

Anyway. So I finally tried it today (by mouth — the possibly safer way). (If I were ever, ever, EVER persuaded to try it any other way, I’m not going to blog about it.) (Which I’m sure only makes you wonder now what I’m actually doing when I’m not blogging about something… Hmm. Indeed.)

But here’s a hint: Don’t mindlessly shake the kombucha bottle while staring out the kitchen window, wondering if you remembered to text the director of your play back or not, before you open it.

I forgot the stuff is super carbonated (fermented). It absolutely exploded all over the place when I twisted off the cap. And I kid you not, it instantly tarnished my silver ring. My favorite ring of all time, mind you. So that was weird.

I still drank some of it and it’s not bad. We’ll see if it does anything, I don’t know — inexplicably wonderful. Not to mock people who swear by it. It’s just that I don’t have any health issues that I know of; I’m only drinking it because today was the day that I stood in the refrigerated health-drink aisle at the store and thought: Maybe this stuff is awesome. So I bought it.

Actually, now that I think about it, today was the day I bought quite a few things at the store that I don’t normally buy. I wonder what’s up with that? Maybe it’s astrological and planets are aligning in some sort of weird way. I don’t know. But I bought things like gluten-free pretzels — turns out they’re hard as little rocks and not very salty.

I bought organic, non-GMO extra-garlic hummus — tried some of that, too, and it was amazing.

I bought organic Greek yogurt with peaches and raspberries in it, rather than with strawberries and blueberries in it, which I usually buy, like clockwork; month after month, year after year.

I also bought organic, non-GMO pure pomegranate juice. I tried a little bit of that, too, and that tasted really weird and it had little dregs at the bottom of the glass, like, maybe I was supposed to decant it. (I’m not sure why I was trying everything today, either. I never come home from the store and immediately start eating and drinking everything that I just bought. So something weird is obviously up with me. I’m obviously searching for something…)

I also bought organic, non-GMO coconut water with pure aloe vera juice in it and that was super good! It really was. However, due to the intestinal-moving properties of aloe vera juice, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t want to drink too much of it or you will never have any reasons to experiment, medicinally, with kombucha enemas.

Unless you don’t want to experiment medicinally and are only interested in the other thing people do with enemas… It’s okay. Rest assured, we don’t judge here in Marilyn’s Room! We’ve seen it all…

Yes. So. Weird shopping day for me. I wonder what’s up with that?

Plus, when I woke up very early this morning, I was once again thinking about that guy that I posted about yesterday — the older guy with the nice hippie family who was just out of prison, and I was 14. It was super intimate stuff that was all coming back to me, meaning stuff he was actually saying to me while we were together — I’m not going to post it here. My point is that, I have no clue why I’m suddenly remembering all this. It happened 45 summers ago. And I had completely forgotten about him. Now, all the details are sort of surging back — for what reason? None of it’s bad. He was very nice to me. He liked me a lot. He liked hanging out with me.

It makes me wonder, did he die or something, and now he’s spiritually revisiting his life in some way and I’m getting pulled into it? I have no clue. All I know is that I’m eating and drinking weird stuff and remembering in graphic detail something from 45 years ago.

Plus, his mom was just so nice; so emotionally open and supportive. Nothing like the mother I had at home. I was always sort of spellbound when people had kind mothers who were easy to talk to. I really just longed for that. Once, when I was 11, I tried to tell my mom something personal and she said, “Don’t tell me this stuff; I’m not your friend. I’m your mother.” It hurt so bad. I felt so isolated.

It’s one of the things I really treasure about my birth mom. Even though she’s really quiet and keeps to herself and you’d think she’d be hard to talk to, I can tell her anything. Absolutely anything. And then she’ll usually say, “You’re just like me.”

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found her. Finding her and then realizing right away, wow, she is just like me. It was my sanity. Finally. I still had a lot of messed-up shit to deal with in my head and in my life (I was 25 when I found her and she was 38), but at least I finally knew that I wasn’t crazy.

What a blessing. I was nothing remotely like anyone in my adoptive family, but that woman who was sitting over there — the one with the really dark eyes, who was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, not looking at anyone or saying anything at all — I am just like that woman over there.

It was a true homecoming, like the kind they talk about in church.

Okay. I’m gonna do some (regular, non-tantric) yoga now and then study my Italian.

I hope you’ve had a terrific Monday, wherever you are in the world and wherever it took you!! Thanks for visiting. I leave you with another one of those truly beautiful songs from that Neil Diamond album, Rainbow, that I blogged about yesterday.

I’ve been playing this song, and “Suzanne,” all day today. Just remembering everything. Fondly. I love you guys. See ya. (PS: Nick Cave is actually gonna do something later this week — with one Bad Seed!! Hopefully it will be all over Instagram.)

“If You Go Away”

If you go away on this summer day,
Then you might as well take the sun away
All the birds that flew in the summer sky
When our love was new
And our hearts were high
When the day was young,
And the night was long
And the moon stood still
For the nightbird song
If you go away, if you go away
If you go away

But if you stay, I’ll make you a day
Like no day has been or will be again
We’ll sail on the sun, we’ll ride on the rain
We’ll talk to the trees that worship the wind
And if you go, I’ll understand
Leave me just enough love to fill up my hand
If you go away, if you go away
If you go away

If you go away, as I know you must,
There’ll be nothing left in the world to trust
Just an empty room filled with empty space
Like the empty look I see on your face
Can I tell you now, as you turn to go
I’ll be dying slowly ’til your next hello
If you go away, if you go away
If you go away

But if you stay, I’ll make you a night
Like no night has been or will be again
I’ll sail on your smile
I’ll ride on your touch
I’ll talk to your eyes, that I love so much

But if you go, I won’t cry,
The good’s gone from goodbye
If you go away, if you go away
If you go away

c – 1959 Jacques Brel; Rod McKuen (English translation)

Good Morning, Little Glories!!

August 4, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

These are some of the (massive amounts) of morning glories that grow along the old fence just outside my backdoor.

I usually get out of bed when it’s still dark out, so I don’t get to see them blooming first thing. But today, I was having such engaging dreams, and the morning was so nice and cool and my bed felt so incredibly comfortable, that I slept in. The sun was shining like crazy by the time I decided I was at last awake.

And when I went down to put the coffee on and feed the many scampering cats, I looked out the kitchen window and there they were, vines full of flowers, blooming in all their glory. Some white, most of them purple.

I love morning glories but you gotta watch out for them. Like honeysuckle, they will spring up everywhere and entwine with other flowering plants and choke the heck out of them. And then when you spend all that time trying to untangle them from whatever beloved plant they are choking, you have to be sure you’ve ripped them out by their roots, because, if you don’t, soon enough, they’ll be back, whispering to you in all their glory: Alas, I’m still here… entwining, choking, entwining, choking until autumn finally arrives and everything dies anyway.

For some reason that I haven’t been able to discern yet, my dreams this morning — which were really sort of liberating — caused me to wake up wanting to hear Neil Diamond’s version of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Suzanne”.

“Suzanne” was a huge hit on the radio when I was a little girl (1967), but it was sung, then, by Noel Harrison. For some reason, I always loved Neil Diamond’s version best, which he recorded several years later. I think because he has such a beautiful, clear voice.

I always loved the song, “Suzanne”. It’s the kind of song a little girl like me would love. I had no clue at all what the song meant but it was filled with so much captivating imagery that I assumed it was cluing me in to secret and enigmatic things about “being a girl” that I would understand when I was a very much older girl.

Of course, the song is on Youtube, so I laid in bed and listened to it on my phone several times before actually getting up today. And the song is still beautiful, still enigmatic. Yet, even all these decades later — well, I understand Jesus better; he certainly became huge in my life, enough to send me to Divinity School and become a minister. But the other stuff about Suzanne, the “girl” stuff I assumed I would understand better when I got older; I do understand it, but the main thing I understand now is that I’m half-crazy and likely to remain so. Forever.

I’m okay with it.

The Neil Diamond album that “Suzanne” is on is called Rainbow. And it’s a really nice album. He sings hit songs written by other songwriters, from 1969-1971. There are just some true gems on that album and he sings them really elegantly. (The track listing is at that link above.)

When I was 14, I played that album all the time, alone up in my room. All of those songs used to make me just wonder about life, you know? In addition to “Suzanne,” I loved his version of Buffy St. Marie’s song, “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” And “If You Go Away,” by Rod McKuen and Jacques Brel.

I guess the late 60s-early 70s approach to love could be what caused me to have such a non-possessive approach to love, too. I have just never been truly jealous or possessive. When I’ve been in love with someone who wasn’t truly available, you know — that would hurt. But that thing I posted about yesterday, about how much it means to me that the person I’m involved with have a really active life of his or her own, away from me — maybe it all stems from those attitudes towards love that were fostered in the late 1960s.

I don’t really know. It’s a thought, anyway.

That same summer that I was 14, when I played that record all the time, I was of course in love with Greg, and we had a ton of sex ; that 14 & 15 year-old sex that is overwhelming and all-consuming but I certainly knew that there was more to sex than what was going on between him and me. After my dad left us, we downsized considerably and moved into one of those trendy apartment complexes that were sort of notorious in the 1970s. Everyone there was having sex with everybody. All ages.

One evening by the swimming pool, I met an older guy. His mom, one of his brothers and his 16 -year-old sister-in-law had just moved there from Missouri. He was fresh out of prison. This was in the years when they sent you to prison for smoking pot. And he and one of his brothers had been sent to prison for that. His brother (the one married to the 16 year-old) was still in and due to get out soon.

They were really nice people. A whole hippie family, even his mom. They got high, and the guys worked construction, and the 16 year-old wife was super nice, really intelligent and just seemed so grown up to me. Of course, the guy wanted to have sex because he’d just gotten out of prison, right? I told him, upfront, that I was willing but that I was only 14, and that I didn’t think it was a really good idea. (I did not look 14, at all, so older guys (i.e., men) came on to me all the time in the 1970s.)

(I forgot to say that he and I were talking about this, about possibly having sex, with his whole family right there, getting high around the dining table, even his wonderful cool hippie mom. You know — the 1970s were just so different, gang. It was technically illegal to do sexual stuff with a minor, but nobody ever took it to the police or anything. We all did it — all my girlfriends. Sex with older guys. If/when our parents found out, they’d get angry and we’d get grounded for awhile and they’d yell at us and say “stop doing that with that guy!” but that was about it. Nobody ever got the law involved. Ever.)

But anyway. So, one of this guy’s brothers had a 16-year-old wife, so they could not care less that I was 14, because, honestly, there was just no way I looked or acted 14, and everybody just figured it was up to me to decide what I wanted to do. Even his mom said, “Honey, it’s up to you. If you want to, you want to. If you don’t, you don’t.”

He wasn’t unattractive or anything, but really I just felt sorry for him because he’d just gotten out of prison, and by age 14, I already knew that grown-up guys needed to have sex all the time. Just constantly. So I said I would think about it. And then the next night, a Saturday — my mom was off with her new boyfriend, doing her 1970s swinging divorced-thing that everyone was doing back then — I let the guy come up to my room; the room with all my rock & roll posters on the walls and my love beads hanging from the lamp, and all my poetry books and all my records and all my 14-year-old girl stuff.

I told him it was just gonna be that one time because he was too old for me and I was in love with my boyfriend, who was my age (and who, sadly, would be dead within just a few weeks).

The record we were listening to while we were smoking weed and having sex was Rainbow, by Neil Diamond.

And of course, I had forgotten all about that until this morning, when I was lying in bed, listening to Neil Diamond sing “Suzanne” and wondering about the half-crazy girl I had finally grown up to be! (The same one I already was when I was 14…)

I am just so totally okay with her being who she is — me. Of course, I sure wish Greg hadn’t been killed, but it was my life.

On another note, you know how all the bloggers are up in arms about these nefarious sites in India now that are illegally mirroring other web sites? Well, mine is one of the sites being illegally scraped and re-blogged. But, honestly, what am I going to do about it? It’s the least of my problems. My books are being illegally downloaded, sold, re-published, all over the fucking world. I gave up trying to stay on top of it, as disheartening as it all is. But the blog? The only thing that truly bothers me is that I can’t access the back end of it and find out how many hits I’m getting….

Okay, gang. Gonna go wash my hair!! Have a super Sunday wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting. I leave you with the soundtrack of me at the glorious age of 14. Enjoy it. I did, all things considered…

I love you, guys. See ya!

Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And you think you maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with her mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

c – 1966 Leonard Cohen

Super Sorry About Yesterday, Gang!

August 2, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

I couldn’t post. I didn’t have the presence of mind. I just had too much going on in my head.

And some of it was good!

I sent the director the first 21 pages of rewrites and his notes were really, really positive, helpful, and often just really incredibly kind & encouraging. So on we go. I’m truly happy about where it’s all heading. Through some miracle now, those things I was having such a hard time staging in my head, are no longer an issue (that “miracle” of course came from the director telling me to stop trying to stage everything and just write). I’m a third of the way done with the rewrites, so I’m guessing that a couple of weeks, tops, and it will all be, essentially, done.

Today, I’m going to make the few changes he suggested, and then switch gears and write another segment for In the Shadow of Narcissa.

And tomorrow, I think Peitor and I will be back on track to work on our Abstract Absurdity script again! I think!

(Plus I have to get the website put together for that. I think I will leave WordPress and build that one somewhere else. Not sure yet. But that blog page for In the Shadow of Narcissa was so stupidly complicated and not user-friendly that I think I’ll try putting Abstract Absurdity Productions somewhere else. ) (And by “user-friendly” I mean that I don’t want to have to keep stopping everything I’m doing to go to another page and scroll through a bunch of stuff just to find out how to do what I’m trying to do. It should all be right in front of me and self-explanatory, you know? Otherwise, it’s not being very friendly. To this user, anyway.)

On another note…

My God, have you noticed how everyone is going back to vinyl now? It’s all over Instagram — all the vinyl options musicians offer now.

Of course, I used to love records. And I still have a really, really cool record player that the cats broke. And I know exactly what’s wrong with it but I need an electrician to actually open it up and fix it. So I can’t imagine that’s happening at any point in my current lifetime.

The only electrician I know who would make a house call for that is that really young (cute) guy who is the father of a tiny newborn baby girl and who calls me “gorgeous” and who really wants to sleep with me (but not get any sleep while doing that).

But he’s a good electrician, damn it! And he lives out here in the Hinterlands! And he’s affordable!

It sucks, right? I mean, I love that all these guys & gals in the Hinterlands still find me a viable option, but I can’t get my mind around how young they are. It would just feel too weird to me. I’m not sure I’m ready for the Harold & Maude thing. Much as I really, truly, honestly loved Ruth Gordon and found her whole life inspiring, and as much as I feel 12, I actually know how old I really am and I don’t want to sort of have to confront it yet.

And then the older guys around here — the HVAC guys, the roof & gutter guys, the painters, the plumbers, insulation installers — the aging hippies who are all tatted up with long grey hair and still have a ton of muscles? Man, they are all over Muskingum County, too. And that is nothing but trouble walking (or driving a pick-up truck). Because I have 700 plays and 16 novels and a couple of memoirs to write — by next week.

So, in short: the record player is broken. And it’s gonna stay that way.

But mostly, I think about all the records I owned in my lifetime — a couple thousand — and what a pain in the ass it was to move those damn things around. I still have about 100 records left, which is still several crates worth that can get heavy when you’re lugging them up & down stairs and in out & out of a moving van. Still, I had to downsize like crazy over time and my world turned into a sort of “Sophie’s Choice,” only with much beloved records, not children. What do I dispose of? What do I try to cling to and have travel with me from place to place to place? (To place, to place, to place…)

So, I made a vow to buy no more vinyl. And I see all these (mostly young) people buying up all this vinyl now and I know what’s coming down the road for them… Good luck with that, I often think to myself.

It’s always all about choices, isn’t it, gang?

(And, wow, all the many different colors of vinyl. I understand the lure of that, too. I would sometimes have, like, 5 different copies of the same Rolling Stones record because it came out in so many different shades of vinyl. I still have David Bowie reciting ‘Peter & the Wolf’ with some foreign Philharmonic Orchestra because it’s in this amazing shade of kelly-green vinyl and the RCA label is bright red. I haven’t listened to it in decades. Yet I can’t part with it, either.

Better just to not make choices that lead to difficult decisions later on, right?

Okay!

Well, August is here. And there are way fewer birds singing in the morning now. It breaks my heart that the summer is winding down, already. There are lots fewer fireflies in the evenings now, too. It’s all about crickets. And even though there are probably still a couple of months’ worth of hot days still ahead, what I dearly love about the summer is already transitioning. I’m going to try to drag my feet and make August last a really long time. We’ll see how that goes.

All righty. I’m gonna get started here on the next installment of the memoir. Have a super fun Friday, wherever you are in the world!! (Assuming it’s even still Friday wherever you are in the world!)

I leave you with this: Part 1 of David Bowie reciting ‘Peter & the Wolf.’ (Alas, though, Youtube does not come in different shades of vinyl.) Thanks for visiting, gang!! I love you guys. See ya.

Gracias, Amigos!

July 31, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Well, today is the final day for the free eBook downloads at Smashwords and I have to say, in all astonishment, my erotic novel from 2011, Freak Parade, (yes, that’s 8 years ago already), had over 1000 free downloads.

So, I’m sort of saying, “thanks,” and also trying hard not to do the math on my royalties had you chosen to download the darn eBook for the usual $3.99. (!!)

But, thank you. That novel meant a lot to me and it frustrated me beyond belief when my agent shopped it for 5 years and no one would publish it because they couldn’t figure out how to market it.

Only 2 editors hated the book, the rest loved the book. So it was just a very frustrating thing that no one would step up to bat for it. (And also to be expecting a 6-figure advance from one publisher and have that dashed at the last moment… at Christmas…)

How can you not know how to market a book like Freak Parade? It’s all about the covert & overt racism shown towards Puerto Ricans in New York City every single goddamned day.

Oh, wait. There’s all that graphic sex in there… God knows, nobody wants to be confronted with sex. It ruins all the racism! And the drugs! And the music! And the Mafia! And all the homeless people living with AIDS!

So frustrating.

Anyway, the book meant a lot to me and so I published it myself. And I think I did a great job. A lot of talented people helped me with it, for sure. The cover, especially. I think that cover alone helped me win the Silver Medal at the Independent Book Publisher Awards that year. I really do. (That was for the trade paper and hard cover editions.)

I am still planning on developing it as a limited online streaming series with Bohemia Originals in LA, but God knows, I’ve got a lot on my plate right at this particular moment.

That said, though, the rewrites on Tell My Bones are really, really going great. Through some miracle, all those things I struggled with before, when trying to translate too many elements from the screenplay to the stage — I’m working all of that through this time. (I think it’s because the director said, “Stop trying to stage it, let me do that.” It opened things up for me.)

Okay, I’m going to close now and get to work. I leave you with the theme song from Freak Parade. And a brief excerpt from the novel below that. Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya.

(Excerpt from Freak Parade, approx. 4 pages)

He took so long getting there that I thought maybe he’d changed
his mind. But then the buzzer sounded at last and I let him in.

“You don’t look so good, papi.”

“I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know.”

He came in and flung himself down on the couch.

“What is it, Eddie? Tell me.”

He sighed heavily and took off his coat. “Nothing.”

I had the money in a wad in my jeans pocket. I pulled it out. I
handed it to him. I said, “Please, take it. Pay me back when you can,
there isn’t any hurry. I don’t need it right now. Take it.”

He wouldn’t take the money. He just stared at it, at me, holding it
out to him. Then a dark cloud came over him and not the look of relief I’d been hoping to see. He said, “Is this what you had me come all the way over for? So that you could humiliate me like this?”

“No, Eddie. I’m not trying to humiliate you. I’m trying to help.”

“That’s not going to help.”

“But it’s a hundred dollars,” I said. “I can get you more if you need
more.”

He stood up abruptly. “I’m going,” he said.

“Eddie, don’t – please. Don’t go. Let me help. It’s just money.”

He turned on me then. He was extremely angry. He spat, “Is that
right? It’s just money? Come here,” he said. “I want to explain something to you about money.”

“No,” I said, knowing where that would lead us. “Come on, Eddie.
Calm down.”

“No. Come here. Right now, come here.”

Instead, I moved farther away. “No, Eddie.”

“I want to make something very clear to you about money, so you
understand, mami.”

“I already understand,” I said. “I can tell – I’m punished!”

“Sí, mami. You are so punished.”

“But why? I don’t understand this! Why?”

“I don’t know why,” he boomed at the top of his voice. “You just
are, goddamn it! Now come here!”

I was petrified. He was too angry for me to risk moving even an
inch closer. I realized I was still clutching the wad of useless money and I felt so impotent that I started to cry.

“Don’t do it!” he shouted again. “Don’t cry! That’s not going to
help me, either.”

I screamed out, “What is going to help?”

“I don’t fucking know!” He sank back down on the sofa, his head
in his hands now. It was as if every ounce of fight he’d had in him only
a moment ago, had run out through a gaping wound. There were tears on his face. I was dumbfounded.

“You have no idea, Genie,” he said quietly. “You have no idea. I
have really been having a fucked-up couple of days. I can’t handle it
anymore. First, the mail came and Father Andrew says that there’s
something in it for me. I never get mail at that place. My mother usually gets my mail. But I knew what was in that envelope Father Andrew gave me. I didn’t even have to open it. I recognized it, you know? Fucking Claudia was suing me for the child support. I opened the envelope anyway and sure enough, not only was she suing me but there was already a hold on my driver’s license until I report to some office on lower Broadway to fill out some sort of pile of paperwork to prove I’m fucking broke. That was it for me, you know? How much was I supposed to take from that bitch? I’m trying to be fair.

“So I went right over to Claudia’s, to try to reason with her. To get
her to drop the suit; to give me a chance to find some decent work and get caught up on the child support. When I get up to the apartment, I find out she’s now living with some guy, some pendejo who has a good job. The two of them both work for the city, Genie, do you know what that means?”

“What?” I said, coming closer.

“It means they both have paychecks coming in, good paychecks,
benefits out the ass, right? Why the fuck does she need to sue me at this particular point? Put my license in jeopardy like this? I have no
goddamned work!”

I sat down next to him. I put my arm around him, tentatively at
first, but he didn’t pull away. He said, “And then my son is there and
do you know what happens?”

“What?”

“My son calls that pendejo ‘papi.’ Right in front of me! Papi. He’s
not your fucking papi, I shouted. I’m your papi. He’s just the hijodeputa who’s fucking your mami!”

I didn’t know what that meant but it wasn’t the time to be asking
for a translation. I guessed it was unpleasant.

“So that pendejo lunges at me. And I’m fine with it. I am going to
bust his fucking head wide open. Let him come at me; let him make the first move. And he does. And my kid starts crying. And there’s a huge fight and of course, I’m winning. I told him, nigger please, just bring it on. And he’s bleeding all over the place and now he’s trying to get away. So naturally, Claudia calls the fucking cops and has me arrested. I got arrested for defending myself. Taken to fucking jail. But I made sure that mamabicho got taken in right along with me – so what? I spend the fucking night in jail. But did they have to handcuff me right in front of my son like that? I asked them to do it outside. Please. Do it outside, even out in the fucking hall. I’m not running anywhere, but they can’t even give me that break. They put on the cuffs. My kid is screaming like crazy at that point.”

“You spent the night in jail? Last night?”

“Sí, mami. I spent the night in jail. And now I have thirty days to
pay that fine or they’ll lock me up again. But they made the mistake of putting me in the same cell as that pendejo and I managed to kick the shit out of him before they realized their mistake and moved me.”

Now at least he was smiling. Faintly, but smiling.

“And then I got back to the shelter this morning and you know
what I find out?”

“What, papi?”

“The church has sold the fucking building! The goddamned
church needs money so I gotta move! I have sixty days and then I’m
out.”

“Oh my god. Eddie.”

“Do you still think it’s ‘just money,’ mami?”

“Eddie, I’m so sorry. What are we going to do?”

“We, mami? It’s not your problem. It’s mine.”

“But how can you have a problem, Eddie, without it being my
problem, too? I love you.”

Clearly, I’d caught him off guard. He stared at me strangely then
he kissed me. “And to think papi wanted to punish you,” he said softly.
“Don’t worry, I still might,” he added. “I know how much it pleases
you…You’re blushing again, mami.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Sí, mami, you are. It’s okay. You don’t have to be ashamed of it, I
know all about it.” He affectionately smoothed my hair away from my face.

“About what? What are you talking about?”

“Girls like you. You don’t think I figured out girls like you a long
time ago? White, Spanish, it doesn’t matter. A girl like you wants to be punished by her papi.”

I was indignant. “I do not.”

“Sí, mami, you do. It makes you come. I know all about it. You’re a
little girl who wants her papi to pay attention to her. I’m a papi, sí? I’m a magnet for girls like you. You aren’t the first one.”

I was speechless, utterly speechless. How had the conversation
wound its way to this; to me feeling like a total fool?

“However,” he said. “To get back to what I was saying. Father
Andrew said I could have a job again taking care of church property,
and not a shelter this time, a place where visiting priests stay. I could
have a house and a yard and a car and a little boat, a charcoal grill and a plastic pool and a goddamned fucking dog if I wanted one, but you know where this paradise is? In Pennsyl-fucking-vania, mami. So there goes that idea.”

“Pennsylvania?”

“Sí, Pennsylvania. I’d have to leave New York.”

“But you wouldn’t have to pay rent?”

“I’d have to pay rent, but at least I’d have a job. I could actually pay
rent. But I’m not moving to Pennsylvania. Who the fuck would I know in Pennsylvania? It would be just me and a pooch and a bunch of traveling priests, like a sideshow or something. And god knows what those priests are ever really up to, you know what I’m saying? And how could I be without you, mami? How could I be without my little Ivory girl making me crazy every day, driving me out of my fucking mind? She’s living with fags, she’s sleeping with dykes; she’s putting cocaine up her nose. She’s doing things I don’t expect, that I don’t understand, she’s doing anything she wants in her little white girl way, whatever pops into her pretty head on any given day until she’s handing me money and I have to shout, stop it you’re punished, and she screams why, papi, why? And I don’t know why, I don’t have a clue anymore…how can I live without that, huh?”

Did I really make him that crazy? “You’d really miss me, papi?”

“Mami, I love you. You know that. I can’t go away. I need to get a
job; I need to find a proper place so that you don’t have to live here like this, without a home, either. So that you can, well…”

This was curious. “So I can what?”

“I want to give you a home, mami. I love you. Whether or not you
want to have a home with me, I guess that’s something you’ll have to
decide. But right now, I can’t do anything anyway. I don’t even have a
place for myself, let alone for you – a girl who could live anywhere in
the fucking world she wanted to.”

Yeah, Baby! You Know What Those Little Happy Cats Mean!

July 30, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

It means it’s laundry day around here!

Am I the only person who loves doing laundry??

I actually love doing laundry. I think because I spent a couple of decades in New York City either having to lug all my dirty clothes to the laundromat, or to the laundry room of the basement of the apartment building.

And now I have my own GE energy efficient washer and dryer, just off of my kitchen! I can do laundry anytime I fucking want to!! And I don’t have to save quarters all week long. (Or all month long, depending on how long it took me to get myself to the laundromat.) (I was definitely one of those people who kept going to Woolworth’s to buy more underwear all the time because I couldn’t manage to get my laundry done in a timely manner…)

But no more! I’m not exactly Susie Homemaker, or anything (although I’m not Susie Homewrecker, either!), but I always have clean laundry.

Okay!!

My second installment of In the Shadow of Narcissa was posted at EdgeOfHumanity.com last evening. You can view it here, in Personal Stories.

Thanks for being supportive of that, gang. It means a lot to me. I will be working on my third installment for that memoir later this week.

Meanwhile, of course, I must get back to rewrites of the play. I spoke briefly with Gus Van Sant Sr again last night. (In case you don’t know or don’t remember, he used to be Helen LaFrance’s business manager — she is the painter that my play, Tell My Bones, is about.) He had sent me over a document that’s going over to the lawyer, about his past history with Helen and her art, and her family, etc. It was fascinating to read.

He is a wonderful man. Really, just the most considerate human being, ever. He once gave me a job when I really, really needed one and he didn’t know me from anyone else on Earth.

I only casually knew the woman who cut his hair at his country club. (He used to be a fanatical golfer.) The reason I was back in Ohio is a long, painful story (if you know anything at all about narcissists and “the discard” you can piece together what ultimately happened with me and my aging, adoptive mother). But that aside, I’d had no idea that the business office of Gus Van Sant’s movie production company was 7 minutes from my house.

At the time, I had been back in Ohio for less than 6 months, I had a new home and a 5-figure mortgage, and then the economy tanked, and the publishing industry practically imploded. 4 of my primary publishers went out of business on the very same day, and even the publishers who published me occasionally either folded, or began paying horrible money as they tried to just survive.

At the same time, I was living with a man I trusted, who moved with me from NYC, but I had no clue he had a horrific gambling problem from long ago that was in remission. The city in Ohio that we moved to had a brand new casino. In record time, behind my back, he gambled away my entire savings. All of it — gone. And I had a new mortgage and no publishers left.

It was really just the best year.

But this hairdresser who hardly knew me but knew I was a writer who had moved to Ohio from NYC, told Gus I needed a job. Sight unseen, he hired me because he needed a new assistant. He truly kept me from going under. And even though he couldn’t solve all my problems for me, he was really just a solid emotional anchor for me when I really, really needed that.

And then the whole Helen LaFrance project was born from that work relationship, so meeting him really was probably the best day of my life.

And the worst year, in hindsight, was likely my best year.

However, on that note, I really gotta get going here! The director wants to meet “in a few days” to go over my re-writes so far, so having some would be ideal, don’t’cha think??

Okay. Thanks for visiting! Have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world! I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning. I think there’s a Country band who has a remake of this song out there somewhere now, but I love this version from the 1980s. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, singing Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” I love you guys! See ya!

“You Ain’t Going Nowhere”

Clouds so swift, the rain won’t lift
Gates won’t close, the railing’s froze.
So get your mind off wintertime,
You ain’t going nowhere.

Ooooo ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oooo are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair

Buy me a flute, and a gun that shoots
Tail gates and substitutes
Strap yourself to a tree with roots,
You ain’t going nowhere

Ooooo ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oooo are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair

Well I don’t care how many letters they sent
The morning came and the morning went

So pack up your money, and pick up your tent
You ain’t going nowhere

Ooooo ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oooo are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair

And Genghis Khan he could not keep
All his men supplied with sleep.
We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep
When we get up to it

Ooooo ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oooo are we gonna fly
Down in the easy chair

c- 1967 Bob Dylan

Just Getting Ready to Figure it All Out…

July 27, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Now it’s all about being a tuner, being a receiver, and allowing the signal to just come.

I’ve written this play how many times already, gang? How many times? Now I just need the best possible version of it to get itself onto the page.

I know it is all there. So I simply have to receive it.

We’ve all decided that Sandra is not going to come here to begin rehearsals on August 5th. We’ll start the rehearsals in September, in NYC. And the director wants to spend the next several weeks here, just working with me on the script. To finally nail it down.

I work well under that kind of pressure, but it is indeed pressure.

And when I say “here” I don’t mean that the director will be here in my ancient home that is from pioneer days. I mean “here” as in 20 miles from me, in his circa 1929 mansion that is just so beautiful and has more rooms in it than I can even remember (i.e., you need to consult your map to find the powder room).

So he won’t be exactly standing behind me, looking over my shoulder as I type; as I sweat, as I squirm; as I squint at the laptop screen because I refuse to wear my glasses; as I fumble with an unlit Pall Mall between my fingers — toying, for hours, with the idea of actually lighting it. Throwing it down angrily once in a while so that I can grab handfuls of my unwashed hair or rub the skin right off my forehead and say: Think, Marilyn, think! There’s got to be a better word here. Fucking find it already. Jesus fucking Christ!

No. He’ll more likely be drinking a whisky, neat, while sitting out on his sprawling veranda, admiring the 3-acre view of rolling lawns and sweeping trees, while listening to the birds and the gentle tick-tock of the grandfather clock coming through the screen door from the vestibule; yes, just sipping whisky and silently awaiting more stellar pages to arrive from me. Where are those stellar pages? he might wonder from time to time, as he looks at his pocket watch, the sun setting serenely in the west…

That kind of pressure.

Anyway. I do work well under pressure. But it does mean that, yet again, Peitor and I cannot do any work today on our micro-script for Abstract Absurdity Prods. 3 weeks in a row now. So that bothers me. But he still has his hands full with exhausting familial/ elderly parents/ obligation stuff out there in West Hollywood. I guess maybe it’s a needed “switching of gears” for both of us right now.

On the topic of short films, though. On Fridays, I get the weekly email from Short of the Week, which always includes about 5 or 6 short films in various categories. Not to be snarky, or anything, but I rarely find anything that truly blows me away. I still watch them for the editing, the camera angles, the shots, the locations – that kind of thing. How filmmakers are best utilizing these things for short films.

Yesterday, however, there were actually 2 films included in the weekly round-up that I absolutely loved. Both were Asian-American influenced themes. One Korean-American: Koreatown (12 mins).

Synopsis: At a discreet host bar in Los Angeles, Kyeong uses his talent and charm to create the illusion of love for the women who hire him. When a new client pays him for a “2nd round,” Kyeong discovers too late that behind her kindly demeanor lies a disturbing request. Watch it online here.

And the other one, Chinese-American: Kiss of the Rabbit God (14 mins).

Synopsis: A film about an ordinary restaurant worker’s extraordinary sexual awakening. Nightly visits from the Rabbit God, who arrives in the body of a tantalizing mysterious stranger, blossom into a tryst that empowers the young man to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Watch it online below:

Beyond that, what I really wanted to do yesterday was stream old episodes of The Flintstones on my iPad and lie around on my bed, delighting in the absurdity of all that old stuff.

However, under the above-mentioned circumstances, that seemed like a usage of my time that might be a wee bit hard to justify right at this particular juncture. So, watching The Flintstones (see yesterday’s post), I guess, will have to wait…

That said! I gotta scoot and get going on some new stellar pages.

Oh, wait! Two things. I never mentioned that my new passport photo was, yes, even more hideous than my new driver’s license photo! A feat that I didn’t think was humanly possible. And I get to keep it for 10 years….

And also: the Summer Sale at Smashwords ends in 5 days. So if you haven’t already downloaded my eBook titles over there (for free), you have 5 more days to do that in. Titles included are: The Muse Revisited Vols. 1-3; Freak Parade; and Twilight of the Immortal. The links are above, under “About Marilyn Jaye Lewis”. (Only Smashwords-linked titles are free; Amazon is not.)

All righty! Now I’m really outta here. Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya!

Yeah, Baby! Drive Happy!!

July 26, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis 2 Comments

Spent the wee bonny hours of this beautiful Friday morning at the Honda dealership!

My treasured Honda Fit was acting wonky during that intense heat wave over the weekend and so I had them look at it. It was feeling like the floor board was gonna drop out of it and I would soon be driving like the Flintstones & the Rubbles:

I love my feet! I wasn’t looking forward to having to run real fast on the freeway…

But after they checked it out, it was a balance issue and Honda had 2 recommendations. There was a $460 difference.

I could either get 4 brand new tires. (approx. $500)
I could just drive slower on the really hot days for the next few months, until my lease is up and I trade in my Honda Fit for a new one, and then just pay for the diagnostics they ran today. (approx. $40)

I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it — meaning for about a nanosecond. Tossed them their 40 bucks and then toodled away! Going my usual 95 mph as soon as I was out of everyone’s field of vision.

But I’m thinking I might fly to NYC in September instead of putting all that wear & tear on the tires, even though I hate flying. Because I’m guessing that when I do trade it in for a new lease, they’re gonna be inspecting those tires under a microscope (one of those giant tire-sized microscopes that you so often see). (I’m feeling like they’re gonna get $500 out of me somehow…)

Anyway! I’m feeling happy! I’d thought it was gonna be a strut issue of some kind and that can get stupidly expensive.

So!

Yes! Even though I had begged her not to do it, Sandra did in fact take another role in a TV show up in Toronto. A 5-show arc. And so she texted that she “might have to switch up those rehearsal days”.

But’cha know… this meant I didn’t have to explain (yet) just how drastically I am re-writing the play, yet again.

The director texted me that since I am doing such intensive re-writes, we could all just wait and begin rehearsals in NYC in September.

So I texted Sandra and magnanimously said that whatever works best for her, works best for us! — “Oh, and I’m doing a few more revisions. We can discuss it later.”

(Although, Sandra probably got my text and wondered, how come Marilyn’s being so calm about this and didn’t include a million exclamation points and tons of unhappy-looking emojis?)

Anyway!! I no longer have to do this massive amount of writing in 2 weeks. And the director wrote during the night saying that he loved the new opening pages and that I was a” beautiful and inspiring writer”.

And I said “thanks” and left out the part about how I had a beautiful & inspiring Muse. I decided to just take all the credit for the moment. (It was super early when his email arrived and the world was still dark, I was still cozily in bed and I only had one eye open and I didn’t want to type some long, drawn-out reply about how amazing my Muse is… so “thanks” seemed sufficient for now.)

So now I have 6 weeks for re-writes instead of 2 and my life couldn’t be better!

However, because of my visit to Honda, which, like everything else around here, is 25 miles away, my morning is gone. So I gotta scoot, gang.

Have a great Friday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting! (Oh, and, wow! thanks for all those visits to the In the Shadow of Narcissa site yesterday. I appreciate it. And I did get one inquiry about how to access the actual posts there — you have to click on the title. And the segments will be posting in reverse order.)

All righty! I love you guys. See ya!

“The Flintstones Theme Song”

Yabba-dabba-doo!

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones
They’re the modern Stone Age Family
From the town of Bedrock
They’re a page right out of history

Let’s ride with the family down the street
Through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet

When you’re with the Flintstones
Have a yabba-dabba-doo time
A dabba-doo time
We’ll have a gay old time

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones
They’re the modern Stone Age Family
From the town of Bedrock
They’re a page right out of history

Someday maybe Fred will win the fight
Then the cat will stay out for the night

When you’re with the Flintstones
Have a yabba-dabba-doo time
A dabba-doo time
We’ll have a gay old time

We’ll have a gay old time!
Yeah!

c – 1960 Hanna/ Curtin/ Barbera

I Smell A Pulitzer!! You Bet’cha!!

July 25, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Another gorgeous day here in Crazeysburg! You would not believe it had been so unbearable only a couple of days ago.

And because it’s so beautiful, I think I’ll spend the next 8 hours, yes, sitting at my desk!

Even while I am actually excited about making the drastic revisions to Tell My Bones — because I believe in the director and I believe that whatever he feels so strongly about is the path to follow here — I do sort of lament that I spent my entire birthday (Monday) at my desk, working on the (old & now useless) revisions of the play.

I was at my desk for over 12 hours on my birthday. And it really was a struggle, because I wasn’t sure the revisions were working, either. I wish the director had read the screenplay earlier (I sent him the screenplay at his request 6 weeks ago) and had discovered earlier that we needed to stop and go back down the previous path.

But it’s futile to wish that too hard, right? For whatever reason, we’re on the path right now. So I try to let go of it and focus on what’s in front of me. And next year, maybe I will spend my birthday doing something wonderful.

Yesterday, I added a new segment to In the Shadow of Narcissa. It’s a work in progress, for sure. It’s not what I would call an actual struggle to write it, but it’s a challenge to find balance there, and to tell the story through the eyes of my actual childhood and not tell the story as my grown self, who knows all the awful stuff that came later.

I’m not exactly sure what years the memoir will encompass. I want it to remain in the realm of my childhood in Cleveland. My happiest childhood memories are of Cleveland, but that’s because my paternal (adoptive) grandmother lived there and she was the very best part of my life.

But I do also have some happy memories about my adoptive mother from the years in Cleveland, even though I was already terrified of her by age 2, when she first lost control and mercilessly abused me. She tried really hard to regain her footing with me after that — and sadly, I believe it was to the detriment of my older brother. This is my own opinion about what happened. But I think that she was so afraid of herself, and of losing her control again with me and then having my dad find out that it had happened again, that she wound up redirecting all her rage toward my entirely defenseless brother.

As if her rage only counted if it was aimed at me, and that my brother didn’t matter. It was horrible, the stuff she did to my brother and I don’t even really know what happened, because she was always dragging him off to his room and I was always told to sit in a chair and shut up and not move.

Once, she tied his hands together and dragged him off to his room, and a lot of screaming, from him, ensued. He was 5 years old. It had started because he wouldn’t stop biting his nails. I was overwhelmed with anxiety, having to sit there and shut up and hearing him scream and not be able to help him.

I do remember one time being unable to control myself and pleading with her to leave my brother alone. “Mommy, stop!” you know, just inconsolable screaming, wanting to help him. And she actually told me to calm down because he was a boy and boys had to learn how to handle it. (As a footnote, my older brother stopped any contact with our adoptive mother back in 1982 and I haven’t seen my older brother since 1995.)

She said this. I remember it so clearly. I had a hard time processing that, for sure. Even at age 4, I could not believe that anyone who was suffering for any reason whatsoever, was meant to learn how to handle it.

Anyway, I’m trying to find balance as I tell In the Shadow of Narcissa. Because I do remember her trying very hard to be kind to me when I was very little, while she was in her early 30s. As the years went on, she became pretty much uncontrollable, 24/7. But I don’t think this memoir is going to be about that. This memoir is going to be about her seeming battle early on to be kind and yet to be filled with rage — a truly unhappy young 1960s American housewife who was also a narcissist. And how disruptive it was to me psychologically, and how, because I knew I’d been adopted, I began very early on, wishing that my “real” mother would come back and get me.

And then that very real fear of realizing that my “real” mother did not know where I was and that I was on my own.

Regarding the play, though. I decided to take last evening off. It was such a lovely night. I played my guitar up in my room for awhile and I even got out this Tom Petty songbook that someone gave me as a gift, recently.

I have never played a single Tom Petty song on my guitar in all these decades. I am strictly an acoustic rhythm player and so electric guitar stuff has never really called out to me, you know? Even though I know that Tom Petty felt very strongly about his songs staying as simple as possible, so that everyone could play it on an acoustic guitar around a camp fire, right? He believed this. I think it worked for him, too, because he was worth something like $95 million when he died. Keep it simple.

(As an aside, I saw a video on Youtube recently, by way of the AThousandMistakes blog in Australia. It was Warren Ellis and the Dirty 3 playing a recent concert in Sydney, I think. And he was introducing a specific song as their version of a camp fire song that people were supposed to be able to play on their acoustic guitars. It was so funny, because no way on earth could anyone else have been able to even attempt to play that thing.)

Anyway, I was looking at some of those Tom Petty songs in the songbook and I was actually astounded to see that some of my favorites from his early days always had about 3 chords. They were so simple to play. Even Free Fallin‘ — I had no idea it had 2 chords in the whole song. In fact, the melody itself is comprised of 3 notes, sometimes sang an octave higher, but 3 notes!! In the whole song.

That tells you a lot about how to become a wealthy songwriter in America, doesn’t it? Where we prefer things to be emotionally simple. We really do. I’m not knocking it, either, because I love that song Free Fallin.’ But we want our songs simple. We’re either happy, sad, or angry. That’s about it.

(As another aside, I remember coming out of Mel’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was late at night. I was with Peitor and I was talking about a song Nick Cave had written, “We Call upon the Author to Explain.” I just love that song, you know. And I said something to Peitor, like, “I just don’t understand why Americans don’t love Nick Cave.” And Peitor looked at me like I was from Jupiter and he said, “Nick Cave is too smart. Americans like things to be stupid.”)

I don’t want that to sound like an indirect way of saying Tom Petty was stupid, because he wasn’t. He just saw the value in keeping it really simple. And yesterday, as I marveled at the 2-chord, 3-note structure of Free Fallin‘ and, you know, considered the state of my own bank account, and I wondered if simplicity wasn’t in fact the way to go…

Okay, gang! I gotta get started here!! As you know, I have a lot of work to do on Tell My Bones in the next 2 weeks. To put it mildly.

Thanks for visiting, though. I love you guys! And I leave you with your right to choose!! Simple, or not so simple. Okay. I love you guys. See ya!

Get Ready to Not See Me For a Long Time!!

July 24, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Yes, I was exactly right.

The meeting with the director lasted 3 hours and what was it about? Pages & pages of reasons why I need to revise Tell My Bones yet again to make the play more like the screenplay.

After I’d spent God knows how many days in an unbearable heatwave, revising the play for the millionth time.

The director does not read my blog. However, you, loyal readers, do. So you know I went into that meeting yesterday knowing he was going to say that.

So I’d had a whole night to sleep on it. I knew it was coming. And I know, with all certainty, that the Universe is somehow going to deliver to me the final version of Tell My Bones that puts the darn screenplay up on that stage. Finally.

I’m not telling Sandra, yet. (She doesn’t read my blog, either.) Because my main concern right now is getting this revised play as close to finished as I can get it in the next 2 weeks. Sandra went through a lot just to free her schedule and make time to fly into this tiny town in Ohio for 3 days so when she gets here, she’d better have something to rehearse or it’s not gonna be funny.

I honestly don’t think she’s going to care which version of the play we run with, as long as she’s got something that she knows is good. (Or gets her a Tony nomination — one or the other. Preferably both.)

The stress was off the charts for me yesterday, gang. However, a huge part of the problem of revising the screenplay for the stage was always how to stage some of things I was seeing in my head. And one of the (many) nice things the director said to me yesterday was that it’s not my job to stage it. It’s only my job to write it and let him do his job of staging it.

So that helped a lot. I’m not going to worry about staging it or about budget, either. I’m just going to write it down.

Within all that stress of me feeling “how the hell am I going to do this in 2 weeks?!” I sort of lost sight of all the incredible things the director was saying about my screenplay. It eventually did sink in after I left the meeting. That what he’s saying, in essence, is: take all these wonderful words you’ve already written and just put it on the stage. Of course, it’s not really that simple, but in a way, the words are the hard part.

I’ve done this kind of intense rewrite/tight schedule thing before and the rewards were phenomenal for me. Back when I was working on the screenplay for DADAhouse. Frequently, the producers would decide that the entire script needed to be re-written over the weekend. I was always having to pull so many things out of my hat, while under incredible pressure. And eating only Powerbars and drinking nonstop Diet Cokes to somehow get through it.

Yet, when I did, the finished result was part of a 10-minute segment on HBO that really just blew people away — including me. It came off so cool. This was back in 1997, when most people weren’t even online yet — it was all dial-up and most people didn’t have home computers yet. But after that 10-minute segment ran on HBO, 28,000 people logged on to our web site within 20 minutes.

So all the fucking stress I’d gone through was worth it.

So I know that all this fucking stress is gonna be worth it, again.

When I got home from the meeting yesterday, I spent about 5 hours getting all the query letters and submission stuff together for the small presses re: Blessed By Light. Because I knew I was not gonna have another free minute to do that for the next couple of months. Why can’t small presses just have the same submission requirements all across the board?

Well, they don’t. So I had to do all that and check, and re-check, and double-triple check that I was sending the right requested materials to the correct publishers, etc., etc. And in the middle of all that, Gus Van Sant Sr called again and asked me if I had all the legal documents drawn up…

ME (awkward, exhausted dead-brain-silence, then): “Um, I didn’t know you were expecting me to do that…”

HIM: “I’m just teasing you! We’re doing that.”

Oh my god, right? I’m supposed to be drawing up legal documents??!! I thought my brain would just crumble to dust when I heard that and I certainly didn’t want him to see that. Or to hear it over the phone. Thank god he was just kidding…

So today, I’m focusing on the next installment of In the Shadow of Narcissa to send to Edge of Humanity. And then I’m gonna get caught up on my Italian lessons — I’ve missed 3 in a row now plus my weekly quiz. And while all that is going on, I’ll have the new revisions for Tell My Bones gestating somewhere in that part of my brain that is directly connected to the Universe.

(And I have the best Muse, so I feel 100% confident that all of this is going to be great, once it’s all said & done.)

Okay, I gotta scoot! Have a wonderful Wednesday, wherever you are in the world, gang!! I leave you with this: a painting by Helen LaFrance, the reason why I’m going through all this in the first place. (If you click on it, you will see the details of her work that will likely stagger your mind – just imagine seeing one of these paintings in real life.) Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya.