Day 17 and my friend and business partner rings me up from Indiana. He’s out there doing Shakespeare with Actors From The London Stage. They’re a beautiful creative actor led company that has been touring for 50 years. The two of us did Much Ado with them two years ago and it’s a very happy memory. When he rings I’m in full Hemingway, sitting writing in the garden with my shirt off, surrounded by dogs, eating an orange just plucked from the tree.
I can hear the cold in his voice. He’s popped out of rehearsal to touch base about some of the work we’re making. It’s good to hear from him but crazy to think that we’re in the same country and he’s freezing. But then this country is vast. And Trump is president of all of it. We talk for a while. It’s good to talk to a friend. Eventually he has to go – his hands are getting cold. I contemplatively munch my orange and get back to writing. It’s great to know that there are plans afoot already, and when this excursion comes to an end I’ll have things I can get stuck into in springtime London.
As I write to you I’m extremely relieved. Today is a red letter day. I managed to submit, on time, my first draft of my first ever screenplay. It’s for the spoof Oscar night I’m doing, and it’s a parody of Denzel Washington’s Fences. The films were chosen randomly out of all the Best Picture nominees. I used FadeIn to do the formatting. It’s free, which is great, although it forces you to use Dropbox to export. I had a choice with the script between playing it safe and getting in something I knew would pass muster but wouldn’t amuse me, or playing it fast and loose and putting some of my humour into it, while taking some risks with tone. I chose fast and loose, of course, and sent it off with my heart in my mouth thinking “they’ll hate it they’ll hate it.” It was written in 2 days with very little time to review, consider or plan, so it’s never going to be Citizen Kane. To be honest I had no perspective left on it. I just had to finish it and send it. As soon as it was submitted I switched off everything and went to yoga, and when I came out I didn’t have lots of hate mail. Namaste. I think I’m going to be using a lot of that software going forward.
The only other thing of note I did today was record a pop video on my smartphone… One of my old friends is releasing a video for Valentine’s Day and wanted to have a mishmash of all her single friends lip syncing along to her voice. Obviously I’m game, but Mark was in cooking dinner which meant I couldn’t sing along in falsetto like I wanted. So it’s me, mouthing along with my huge fluffy beard, and her high pitched gospel soaring out of the speaker. Once it’s edited I’ll work out if I can post it on here.
The last two days have mostly involved me writing, which doesn’t make for good blog action. I’ll do my best to get myself into some scrapes tomorrow.
AlBarclay 