Weddings I have Written

Years ago, a friend called and asked me to get ordained in a mail-order church, so that I could conduct their wedding ceremony. Turned out cool. I wrote a little something, the bride and groom wrote their own vows and we did it. It was over in the valley (San Fernando) for those non-LAers, at the groom's mother house. The food was wonderful. The bride was Brazilian and her friends cooked. The groom worked for Bon Appetite and they cooked. Had a hotsey totsey art photographer and music and flowers done by the bride. And the next day, I was in the the car, listening to KCRW and the DJ described the wedding and said it was the coolest one he had ever been to.

Well, I get to do it again in Portland. My nephew is marrying. They sent me this whole big ceremony, which I'm in the midst of rewriting in my own words (mostly to give it flair and drama) but keeping it in the same structure and the vows they wanted. It will also help me to learn it. Writing a marriage ceremony is not an easy business.

Maybe there will be a video to put up here.
I bought a new suit and everything.

It's also hard to write about God and sacred stuff if you don't agree with the words themselves. I believe in things, just not with those christian words that make martyrs and bigots.

Daydee

She encounters her father, who she hasn't seen in 34 years, living in the bushes out on the edge of town near a house she inherited. He is crazy as a loon. They both somehow know who the other is. Then what is to be done with him? Has she any obligation really?

Flashback of New Orleans, she and John Seagum in bed on a Saturday morning (the only time he can perform) They begin drinking by 9:00 am. He whiskey, she tequila sunrises. 

She finds heroin works in the empty house- but it is very old. It makes her think of other individual paraphernalia she's found in her mother's things and then she realizes that her mother was probably a junkie. Which then leads her to believe the mother was sleeping with the three men

Flashback of mother being incredibility critical- something inane - like a dance recital at 13.

Are there ghosts? Great grandmother and great aunt in empty house? Great uncle in barn? Mother in church?
Dead dog in yeard?

 

More about Daydee

Daydee has come to meet with the sleaze ball lawyer. She's been through her mother's records and found a deed to land that she apparently doesn't own in the estate and the friendly guy that has been helping her, told her that her mother signed it over to the lawyer for legal fees owed. She has come to try to get written proof. In the conversation, the lawyer tells her that the sheriff had found remains of a body out on this particular farm. And they had decided it was probably been Daydee's father and that he had been murdered. So they were investigating Daydee's mother for it. The lawyer thinks she did kill him and makes mention of evidence that she brought him, but he asked her to take it away. He thinks Daydee's father probably deserved to be killed. Sleaze ball lawyer never produces transfer paperwork on the land. He tells Daydee it was for payment of legal fees for defending her in the murder investigation.

Daydee has agreed to hire the sleaze ball minister to open and close the graves and to do the grounds work on the cemetery for the time being. He wants her to put up signs around the cemetery and wants her to sell the bucket off the cemetery's backhoe to him for cheap. (Basically, handicapping her ability to hire someone else, or to learn to do it herself.) He is pompous twat. He reminds her of his moral superiority whenever he gets the chance and bugs her about buying a marker for her mother's grave, which she does do until late in the book.

The friendly guy drives her all of town and takes her to breakfast at the local diner where he introduces her around as her mother's daughter. And reminds the guys in the diner that she went to high school in town here. He tells her details and stories about her mother's business that she doubts that he would really know. The friendly guy has a wife with Alzheimer's out at the local nursing home who he visits every week.

I write all of these scenes down and then cut them up and lay them out on the floor of my studio and try to put them in dramatic order and find a structure. So you get to share the process.

 

The Third One (or The Second One)

The other one is a full blown tale about a Purchasing Agent for a large unnamed university who is almost disabled from Parkinson's and is being laid off in the midst of a huge janitor strike. A women he's had the hots for, for years, has been laid off and so her kids can't get free tuition any longer. He's got friends in high places because he buys toys for all the bigwigs. And he knows who pulls the strings and knows who is responsible for laying off all of the university's janitors. So he decides he's going to assassinate the evil person at commencement. He is saved at the end by the slug people that work as gophers for the bigwigs. And he doesn't actually kill anyone- he gets to the point where he can do it, but doesn't. He fades away into the Parkinson's delusions or dreams at the end like death has come to claim him.

There was a Michael Douglas movie about an engineer who loses his job and then his car and he tries to walk home and ends up with a gun... something like that but sweeter.

All three of these could be full blown, probably dark books. All are based on personal stuff (Ah, really?) A friend thinks I need to write a book with a happy ending. I think all three will have an up ending, although not necessarily a happy one.

The next step for me is to start compiling scenes and see if they add up to a book.

 

The Workings of the mind

This is the one that I am probably going to write next. Paris, Ill. Little farm town. A 45 year old lady gets off a Greyhound bus, dressed like this and her heels click on the worn out 50 year old sidewalks. Daydee (Diedra) has been a call girl and later a paid mistress in New Orleans most of her life. The last man she was involved with is in prison and her mother has just died, leaving everything to her. She has an over the hill face now. Only sixty year olds find her slightly attractive. Anyhow, she's inherited a farm and some buildings and a privately owned cemetery in this little town. The three men that try to help her, went to high school with her. They have a secret and guilt associated with her, that she doesn't even remember, but they do. She changes with trying to make a go of things here. Her father, who she barely remembers, and disappeared when she was 10, turns out to be alive and is a crazy street person who has only just returned himself and is discovered living in the bushes outside of town. She's writing letters to her guy in prison. Definitely Faulkner in Illinois. I need the bottom of the bottom for her - that's probably the big piece missing. It occurred to me that maybe she's pregnant and doesn't realize it.  

Cooking up another new story

I've never understood writers that can't write. I seem to carry around at least three books in my head that are waiting to be written. Mailman, pith helmet, hairy legs, (a lonely man - that might be the title.) lives alone, carries a deep pain inside from a lost love. A can of doggie mace in his pocket. On his route in Beverly Hills, doesn't have his ipod today because he forgot to charge it, finds the front door ajar and the moans of a woman coming from within in. He enters to find a lovely young thing splattered with blood, holding a knife over her father's body. Dead of course. She swears she didn't do it. She asks for his help. He convinces her to call the police. She hangs on him. The police arrest her for the murder. He's convinced she didn't do it, or sees this as a way to win her love if he finds the real murderer. He delves into this guys life. Everyone loved him, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Big movie mogul, mistresses, a son, a wife, the daughter turns out to be a big problem- lots of affairs. Everyone he meets has a motive. He Sherlocks it out. He does get the girl, but it ends badly. He solves the murder.

What do you think?
Marlow as mailman.

Hair

How did this come about? Well, we all want to be different than the generation before- god forbid that we would look like our WW II parents (in my time). I was in my thirties before I was intimate with a woman who shaved her legs.

We were free and natural. Wore patched jeans. Let our hair grow. Grew mustaches and beards. My women friends were hippies too.

Who would want to look like anyone from the 1980s? 1950s? 1960s?

How long has my hair been?  In 1982, it was above my ears. The Bonaventure Hotel had a dress code. It was the days of three piece suits. I've not had a tie on in two years now.

Do they make fun of us, like we did of our parents values?