Well, dear readers, the holiday season is over and I’ve gotten the relaxation I have gotten and now it’s time to go back to lots of work. Fortunately, I like lots of work. I haven’t exactly been idle this past week, but it really was good to be able to kick back, watch some movies, listen to some music and let my brain clear and my batteries recharge, which I do believe has happened, brain clearing-wise and batteries recharging-wise. I hope everyone here had a wonderful holiday time.
Yesterday was a Sunday kind of day. The good news is that I got ten hours of glorious blessed sleep, thanks to a shot of NyQuil and leaving the heat on. I can’t keep doing that – it completely dries me out, but now that the heat is working properly, I think I’ll do without it tonight and see how long it takes to heat the house in the morning. After I got up, I had a telephonic conversation, then futzed and finessed the previous day’s writing. That took about ninety minutes and then I began a new chapter. I wrote about six pages, then took a break and sat on my couch like so much fish.
Yesterday, I watched a cheeseball 1984 movie on Blu and Ray entitled Trancers. I’d read about it online and was interested only because it was shot in LA and because it was one of Helen Hunt’s first leading movie roles. It was one of a huge number of low-budget cheesefests from director Charles Band. And I have to tell you, it’s the first Charles Band movie I’ve ever seen. It’s as horrible as you might imagine, but Tim Thomerson is fun and Helen Hunt is, even in shlock like this, adorable, with impeccable timing. The effects are awful, the music is awful, the script is awful, but there’s a certain amount of giddy fun to this kind of awfulness. The film only runs around seventy-four minutes. They build you up to the big showdown between hero and villain and that turns out to take about thirty seconds and is so anti-climactic it’s not even funny. The transfer seems fine and looks just like a grade C low-budget film of that era. I did remember that we offered Tim Thomerson the role of Rodzinski in The Creature Wasn’t Nice after Christopher Lloyd dropped out. Thomerson couldn’t do it, and that’s when we found Gerritt Graham, which was a gift from heaven.
After the movie, I wrote four more pages. Then I went out to dinner with a friend. First we drove by Granville – lines out the door. Then we tried Talesai – closed. Then we drove by about five other places, all jammed. And that’s the way it’s been for the entire holiday season – every restaurant jammed day and night because heaven forbid anyone should actually make their family a home cooked meal on a Sunday night. We ended up at Vitello’s because it looked empty. We walked in and saw lots of empty tables, but were told it would be a thirty-minute wait unless we wanted a really awkwardly placed table near the entrance. We took that. I marveled at how they’d managed to take a warm and comfy family-style restaurant and completely subvert it to one of those cold, industrial-looking jernts that I can’t stomach. Then our waiter breezed by the table saying he’d get to us in about ten minutes. That, coupled with a menu, which had almost none of the original Vitello’s dishes, was the straw that broke the Kimmel’s back, and we bolted. At that point I called Boneyard, the barbecue jernt in the Oaks of Sherman and asked if we could get in at seven-thirty, which was about ten minutes from then. She said to come right over, so come right over we did. As it turned out, it had been jammed, but eight or nine parties had all just left, leaving half the restaurant empty.
We ordered way too much food and we ate all of it. It was combinations of things – we each had three baby-back ribs, and we shared some pulled chicken, some brisket and a hot link, as well as sides of cole slaw, potato salad and baked beans. All of it was amazing, but I felt like I was going to explode. Fortunately, I hadn’t eaten anything prior to that. Then I came home, my friend and I had a nice chat and then I wrote two more pages for a total of twelve. Normally at the end of seven days of writing during the first week, I’m usually right about forty pages tops. After four full days of writing, I’m just going on to page fifty-three, so that feels really good.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll futz and finesse yesterday’s writing, then I’ll print out the first fifty-two pages, Xerox them, and get them over to Muse Margaret to see what she thinks of them. Then I’ll write some more, eat something light, then we have our first Kritzerland rehearsal at four, which should go till about seven-thirty. Then I’ll resume writing.
Tuesday I have a morning meeting with the musical director of Inside Out, then I have a dinner with our very own Mr. Nick Redman and his darling daughter Rebecca. Wednesday I may take my car in to have something checked, and I will, of course be writing on each of those days. Thursday is our second Kritzerland rehearsal, and then our stumble-through is on Sunday and our show is on Monday. There’s only about fifteen seats left at this point, maybe less.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, futz and finesse, print, Xerox, deliver pages, eat, write, rehearse and write. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite cheeseball movies of the 1980s (and there were PLENTY)? And from yesterday, what are your favorite Barbra Streisand songs? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, after which it will be back to work with a vengeance.