I love Studio meetings. You only get the meeting if they like what they've read, so already you're going in with people liking you. I like when people like me. And then they ask you questions about your life and you feel like you must be very interesting, like your on a hipper version of "The Charlie Rose Show."The thing that always comes up is, "How have you been spending your time since your last show?"
"I produced two plays, wrote a spec, an awesome pilot and outlined a second." But I always fantasize about adding this lil' diddy, "But right after the last show, after my cousin was killed and my mom had a nervous breakdown, I mostly laid on the couch with the heat cranked up and the curtains closed. That's even if I've even gotten out of bed and had my breakfast of Doritos and Diet Orange Shasta."
But if you say that, the meeting ends, your sticker pass is abruptly ripped from the blazer you're going to return to Bloomingdales after the meeting and security leads you out and takes note of your license plate so the mistake of letting you on the lot never happens again.
The thing is, now that I have started this blog and gotten tens of thousands of hits, and I hear "the blog is the new and hip thing" and there's nothing better that I like than to be is "the new and hip thing" unless the choice could be, "the new and thin thing," I really REALLY wanna brag about this blog in a meeting.
But sometimes when I start with the story that is impetus for this blog - the murder of my cousin, the losing of my job, then my boyfriend, my mother's nervous breakdown after my cousin's trial all in the course of one year... the room gets really silent.
"I swear though... it's really funny." Crickets, crickets, crickets.
Maybe it could have never seemed funny, ever, even to me. But the reason I wrote this blog was because some of the things that happned were so HILARIOUS, so ABSURD, that I felt like if I didn't write them down, I would not have believed them myself.
For example, my Mom was having her nervous breakdown and it was after midnight. We were afraid if we brought her to the hospital like that they would committ her and it would make her condition worse. My sister and I just looked at each other, trying to come up with a plan, and at the same time said, "Ambien."
So we drugged her. I know I'm laughing! Because it was absurd. A glimpse of human nature of two scared daughters who thought the way to protect their mother was to drug her into sleep so they could catch their breath and come up with a plan.
E took Mom upstairs and I went into the kitchen to check on my Dad. "How are you?" He fingered a can of tuna my sister had brought back from Europe. "This tuna... I won't eat it. I only like tuna packed in water."
That's how he was doing. He was not there.
At the hospital, we brought water, fruit, nuts, magazines and two dozen donuts. It was like we were packing for a road trip. My sister and I went in one car and my father and mother in another. My father dropped my mother, a woman who doesn't, now, even know her date of birth, off in front and parked the car. My mother entered the emergency room and seeing the Au Bon Pain restaurant set up in front, thought she was in Au Bon Pain and left.
We had lost our mother at the hospital. Maybe I'm a bad daughter. I didn't find it funny then, but I do now.
'Cause that's how we heal, when we can laugh about these things. Maybe they're not stories for meetings but they are a hell of a bunch of stories, proving that you can go through hell and come back the other side... and even find some of it, kinda funny.
This blog is dedicated to tuna packed in water.
