I finished up a song when I couldn't sleep last night, and I've been finessing it most of the day, and it's going to be in the January young person's show - sung by Sami, as the opening number. I've been working on this damn thing on and off for nine months. The music came right away, but the lyric had to be very specific for the character who'll ultimately sing it - but that character has been developing over the last six months. I guess I can spill partial beans and say that I'm creating and writing a one-person show for Sami about a fourteen-year-old girl. This grew out of a monologue I wrote three years ago for Melody Hollis. It was really funny and they'd come to me because they could not find any good monologues for that female age group and certainly nothing funny. So, I began to think about expanding that into a series of monologues, which I then began to do. But then I put it aside when I stopped working with her (thanks to her mother), and started thinking about it again at the beginning of this year. I still liked the idea and I talked to Sami and her mom about it and the challenge it would be and Sami was very up for it. So, we've done a bunch of meals and I've asked her lots of questions and out of that has grown about nine monologues so far, but it's also morphing into not just spoken monologues, but also songs, some of which I'm putting in the show because they're perfect for it (like Annie), and most of which I am writing as I go. At some point early in 2015, we'll do a private reading for friends and see how it feels. The structure is everything - right now it's just a bunch of monologues and songs and I have to sequence them and make sure there's a build and flow. If we succeed with this, I think it would be very popular as a performance piece for talented young people, and the monologues themselves can be excerpted and used singly.
