70 SCENES KNOCKING

Woke up in the middle of the night. Maybe 3 or 4. Not sure. Someone was ringing the doorbell, over and over, and it woke me up.  I could see that our motion detector light had gone on for the front porch. The ringing had stopped when I awoke. Whomever was doing the ringing had done so every couple of seconds. I stood there, wondering who it was... a drunk kid? The police? Death? Took me a while, then I remembered we don't have a doorbell.

Dreams last night were a jumble. A room full of spiders. Theatre students asking for help with a scene or monologue. Theatre teachers looking for work, and all of us moving into a tiny apartment for the foreseeable future. There were other dreams, but they vanished like the morning fog, burnt off by the sun.

Last night we watched the movie Ladybird. So good. I'm trying to watch as many coming of age movies because I am working on a coming of age type story. I figure I should watch/read as many of those types of story as I can, see what other folks have done, how they approached it. In Ladybird, scenes are very compact. We are given the essence of each incident, and move on. It was a revelation to me. I have a list of little scenes I want in my movie. I keep note of them in this Bigfoot pocket journal I was given. I get a lot of things related to Sasquatch, have most of my life. I like cryptozoology, my first feature script was about Bigfoot and mythical beasts, and my theatre company is Sasquatch Productions. They all feed the myth of me and Bigfoot. There is even, on that list, a scene where as a boy I watch a documentary about Bigfoot. But I digress. The point is, I have a list of scenes, moments from my life from 1975-1977. I want the list to have at least 70 moments. This is because I read a thing by David Lynch once saying when you are preparing to write a movie, get a bunch of note cards, and write on each one an idea for a scene for your movie. When you have 70, you are good to go. So I'm giving it a try. It seemed, watching Ladybird, that maybe this is what Greta Gerwig did. I read that at one point her screenplay was over 350 pages. Amazing. She must have cut so many bits, so many moments.

Later, we were doing our now daily meditation, and I had a thought hit me like a bolt of lightning right when good old Deepak was giving us the days mantra. A simple thought, true, but it seemed super important at the time. All stories are about love, or the lack thereof. Love of the world, or each other, or that certain someone, or one's art. Or no love, angry and sad people doing angry sad things, all the result of no love. I think might look at each scene in my script and see how that principle applies. Maybe it will make it amazing. Or terrible. We shall see. As soon as the meditation was over, I reached for my notebook and began writing as fast as I could.

Today's agenda: Writing; Walking; Cleaning; Reading; Going Over Stimulus Plan; Games with Ryan and Lauren via Zoom; Movie. Who knows what else. So go find the love in your world.

Here's a song.