I have a sterling silver ring, it’s meant to be a wedding band but I wear it on my right hand ring finger. Engraved on the outside of it, in Italian, it says: Tutto e possibile. engraved on the inside, in English, it says: Anything is possible.

Obviously, I look at this ring every day. Since I’m wearing it, I can’t help but see it. But even after all these years of wearing it, it really does serve as a constant reminder to me that, as overwhelming as my life usually gets, and as demanding as I am in regards to what I expect from my creative life, any of it can happen. It’s all in the realm of the possible.

When I’m overwhelmed (which is frequently), I see that ring. I remind myself. And on I go.

So!! At last!!

I’m happy to announce that the play I wrote last week for Sandra Caldwell, Tell My Bones (the adaptation of my award-winning screenplay of the same name) now has a NYC-based director attached. The playhouse down in Sarasota, FL is expecting our staged reading within the near future. As a trial run, we’ll be doing the staged reading, first, in the wonderful Village of Rhinebeck, NY! (Loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall that this is the very same town I was planning to move to before I discovered the joys and awesomeness of Muskingum County, Ohio and decided to settle here and just drive to Rhinebeck whenever I had to work with Sandra and that proved to be the most amazingly magical decision I ever made, for so many reasons).  Anyway.

All things going according to plan, we will do a run of the play later this year, first in Sarasota, then move it to NYC, somewhere Off-Broadway.

Yes. That’s right. It’s only taken years for this to finally happen. And now it’s happening at warp speed. (If today is your first day visiting this blog, I didn’t really write the play last week; technically, I did, but it’s been in the works for a while.)

Two years ago, I first saw a play the above-referenced director had directed. And even back then, I immediately thought: He would be a good director to meet so that I could get him to direct Sandra when I finally adapt Tell My Bones.

That’s a lot of “if’s” in the air. However, this past summer, I saw a couple more shows he directed and I was convinced beyond doubt that he would be the perfect director for the project that was not yet entirely conceptualized. But I still just started going for it.

You know, I did that rude thing where, when he and his husband were having a quiet dinner alone, tucked in the corner of a lovely candle-lit restaurant, I saw them and went directly over to them, uninvited and just started talking. Hi. I think you’re a great director. I’m a writer.  I write for this actress in NYC. I’ll friend you on Facebook and text you on Messenger.

And then in October, I’ll drive 11 hours to Rhinebeck and pull off the most miraculous thing ever: I get Sandra to not only agree to come into the city with me and meet someone she doesn’t know for cocktails (the husband of the director), but I also get her to do this on time. We very nearly missed the train… and yet, we didn’t!!

And then it’ suddenly January. Sandra suddenly needs the play to be entirely finished. She was under the impression that it already was entirely finished. This had something to do with something I might have said a few months back that heavily implied it was entirely finished and that I hadn’t started it over completely from scratch.

But now it’s finished. She loves the play. I asked said director, “Would you like to see this play I wrote for Sandra?”  He says yes. Flies in from California on his way to NYC, reads part of it and says “this is pure poetry” and then I say, “Will you direct it?” and even though he’s stupifyingly busy, he said yes. Then I finally get Sandra on the phone down in Florida yesterday, where she’s in the middle of a show, and I tell her the news. She’s in a not entirely good mood, but says, “All right. I’ll trust your instinct on this, Marilyn. ”  And voila!

Two years later.

Tutto e possibile, gang! (And, YES!, I played this song almost nonstop, at top volume, for those 11 hours I was driving to NY…) (Pay close attention to the second verse.)

Okay, see ya! I love you guys. Thanks for visiting!

Just when I thought I was finally taking my time, working on all my various stuff-in-progress at leisure…

Loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall that from April through September of 2018, I was hard at work down at my kitchen table, trying to revise, re-fashion, reform, adapt my (award-winning!!) screenplay  Tell My Bones, about the life of folk painter Helen LaFrance, into a stage play for Sandra Caldwell.

I set it aside, momentarily, because I suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, began writing a novel called Blessed By Light.

I then had to set that aside in order to do extensive revisions to my CLEVELAND TV pilot before going to LA.

Came back from LA, was in the throes of falling in love, went thoroughly and completely insane instead, contemplated the value of attempting suicide, decided I preferred writing & being in love to the prospects of being damned for eternity or whatever would have happened there, and then a couple of days ago, I began yet another undertaking, Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse (sort of an erotic memoir in letter form), wrote the first “Letter,” when suddenly and without warning,  Sandra Face-Timed me and I had not washed my hair in days…. !!!!! (People! Please! Do not Face-Time me without giving me much advance notice so that I can wash my hair!! You truly DO NOT want to see me the way I usually look!!)

Anyway.

She Face-Timed me and said that she wants to do the Helen LaFrance play now, possibly in Florida, before we do The Guide to Being Fabulous, which was supposed to go into staged readings in NYC, like, really right now, but hasn’t.

I hemmed, people, and I hawed. And she said, with a little alarm: “You’ve got it, right? It’s ready, right?”

Oh yeah, yeah. Sure.  I’ve got it right where you want it! Just let me tweak it a bit…

So anyway, that’s where we stand. I must seriously complete the Helen LaFrance adaptation and get it to Sandra, and so I now have about zippo time for writing on the blog!!

So please forgive my sporadic posts at this point in time.  I will endeavor to, you know, just write a whole heck of a bunch of stuff, including the blog posts, and just throw it on out there as I go zipping past!!

Meanwhile, thank you for visiting! I love you guys. I hope things are going really great in your area of the world. I leave you with this! A synopsis of sorts! Come see the play! You won’t want to miss it! (See it before it wins the Pulitzer and ticket prices go through the roof!! I’m just sayin’…)

Tell My Bones: The Helen LaFrance Story

A One-Woman Play with Music in One Act
Approximate running time: 90 minutes

Tell My Bones is the true story of how self-taught folk artist, Helen LaFrance, becomes a beloved painter of the rural South while enduring the hardships of Jim Crow-era Kentucky. 

The paintings of Helen LaFrance now hang in galleries around the world, but it took nearly a century of tragedies and sacrifices for that to happen.

Tell My Bones is the life of the indomitable Helen LaFrance, who tells her quite personal story through the magical world of her beloved folk art. Paintings such as “Bringing in the Cotton,” “Tobacco Harvest,” and “Quilts in the Breeze” come alive on screens that recall bedsheets hanging out to dry on clotheslines in a more rustic world. Her paintings unveil the story of a loving, rural family, surmounting hard times in 20^th Century Kentucky. Tell My Bones is an uplifting one-woman drama set to the stirring music of specially arranged African-American Spirituals that celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit.

Descended from runaway slaves, Helen LaFrance is born in 1919, on a farm in Graves County, Kentucky, in a log cabin built by her father. When Helen is 3, her mother teaches her how to paint, using berries and laundry bluing as “paints” and twigs for paint brushes. Needed as helpers on the farm, Helen and her 3 sisters receive only one year of formal schooling, with most of their education coming from their parents, who teach them to read and write from the only book they own – the Bible.

Upon the death of her mother, Helen is sent off the farm to earn her living in the nearby town, first as a live-in maid, then as a factory worker. Fostering other people’s children along the way, her five marriages do not bear children of her own. Some of her foster children bring her great joy, while others bedevil her – robbing her and burning her house to the ground. Throughout the trials of life, Helen pursues the chance to paint at every opportunity. She finally achieves success as an artist at the age of 89, but then suffers a paralyzing stroke. Will she teach herself to paint again? Through her unconquerable faith in God, she does. At age 94, now confined to a wheelchair, she receives Kentucky’s highest honor, the Governor’s Award, for her complete body of work: hundreds of paintings that have now sold all over the world.