As Teenie Alexander made her way to the sea hut, she had no idea that she was part of something much much larger. How could she have known that eons ago an ancient turtle had foretold her birth. That she would be the last girl on the planet who could speak the Language of the Heart. The thing of it is, we just never know what we are going to grow up into, do we?
Teenie walks down the beach to the sea hut as the ocean brims with sea creatures dipping and diving, alive. She stops to collect shells along the way, marvelling at the sea glass.
Teenie parts the seaweed curtain, climbs in and sees that Devlin has left her a red rose on top of the abalone shell.
TEENIE
(opens Dev’s note)
He wrote the word LOVE, just like I did
(presses the rose to her heart)
Close in on her hand writing these words:
If I thought of something that could show the language of the heart what would it look like?
Teenie begins to draw in her journal, and decides to write Devlin a special poem
TUT
(floating offshore watching)
(Close in on his ancient eye and flippers moving, as he watches Devlin walking down the beach)
They are the last two humans who know the secrets of the heart
You will never know the wounds you are capable of carrying, until you have to. The era comes back to haunt you. The monster that he was.
And then you will think of all the kind men who surrounded you then.
As they prepare you for the anesthesia you whisper, to God, let me die.
Let me go now.
And then you sink.
Everything is gone.
They wake you up.
They wake you up as if you have made some kind of mistake and girls are so disposable anyway.
The pain lives in a vault, in a chamber of your heart, that you learn to bury deep.
You won’t be alone.
They are shaking you.
“Wake up,” they say.
“Nooooo.”
They keep shaking you and shaking you and shaking you.
You wake up.
It wasn’t your time.
It wasn’t time for God to take you. Not yet.
You were only 22.
Now you realize perhaps God himself put you through this.
He keeps driving up, after.
He keeps driving up.
A girl lies next to you in the little room they make you walk to.
There are two beds. So you can recuperate.
She weeps, softly.
You weep.
There is a list on the table, with hundreds of names on it.
And the names are lined through.
And the names have names to come, after the two of you.
They run them through here like cattle, you think to yourself.
Cattle.
Chattel. Cattle.
Chattel.
That he never loved you is the hardest lesson you will ever learn.
Your mother, who had always told you, “Come to me with anything,” is going to be no help. She simply tells you her French friend Selima had to have 14 of them, because of the Nazis.
Jim offers to marry you.
In the cold silence of your room, full of beige, full of books, with the money he had thrown down on the table, to pay for it, you stepped into the bathroom, while he slept and photographed yourself in your white Mexican wedding dress, with his Leica.
You had grasped at straws.
There was no way to call your father.
Your uncle was gone.
Your grandfather was tending to your grandmother, who had had a stroke after her son died, suddenly.
“Stand on your own two feet,” he said.
It’s that Christmas, it’s that day, when you know you have no choice.
There will be millions of girls that day, across the country.
Like the girl lying right next to you.
You didn’t die.
Maybe because you had to write a book, that would come many years later, so that no other girl would have to face this kind of thing, ever again.
I drove down to Los Angeles to meet the French sperm who was my father. He had hired detectives to find me at Santa Barbara High School. When I was 16. He said, or his current wife said through the door, “His therapist feels that you need to meet him, now.”
I stood in terror behind the door of our place on Carillo Hill, that day.
I thought maybe my real father, not the man I called Daddy, who was my father, to me anyway. (Since Mother made it so I could never call him) and I actually was that naive, to think that he might be able to give me some direction. I was two weeks late on my period. Student Health at UCSB arranged for me to take a urine test.
I was the girl who lived on Red Rose Way.
I was the girl who had no father.
Not like my mother’s father.
I was also a girl that my mother had no time for.
She made me into her best friend.
So I never even had a chance at being a daughter.
She told my best friend, “The men are going to come for Adrienne.”
My best friend told me that years later, going through her second divorce.
He lived north of Wilshire.
I found him.
I made an appointment to arrive, the last trip I ever took down to Santa Monica in my Audi. I was just a girl of 22, needing help.
There was no man to turn to.
Years later, reading the poem I wrote in Edgar Bower’s class, it’s what I wrote after.
I handed it to him, and he laughed it off. That acid dropping, clown. He laughed at my writing, some stupid little college girl who was getting D’s and F’s Winter Quarter at UCSB. The girl who he came up to rape and keep on raping, time after time, day after day, with that poisoned cock he had, covered in vitiligo. The cock that only knew how to rape, not love. He was like a battering ram, with it. Once he said, “I want to see my cock come out of your throat.”
To this day I remember his favorite position.
I never let another man put me in that position ever again, when I had sex.
The girls at work, the younger ones were having babies, and I made a quilt for Bonnie in Classified, for her baby.
Mine was gone, and I sewed the quilt for hers.
I’ll never forget how happy she was to see it. It was polka dots with an eyelet edge, and I tied it instead of quilting with many colors of embroidery thread.
Rosie had taken me aside.
I told her I needed to take three days off and I was crying.
I loved Rosie.
I also loved her funny boyfriend too.
She told me, she had to have one too.
I don’t know how I survived.
There has been some purpose for me to have survived.
Perhaps it is to write it down.
Never let a man kill your heart and soul.
Never.
The clinic was near Cottage Hospital.
Jim, offered to marry me. Years later when we saw each other again, we discussed our lives.
I said, “What if we had married?”
I thanked him for the offer he had made me. His chivalry.
He will forever be in my mind as that.
Not all males are chivalrous.
I think males know other males very well, just as we know other women very well.
It’s in our genes,
I didn’t love Jim.
I was in love with the photographer.
I couldn’t have slept with Jim.
I couldn’t have asked Jim to take something on, that he wasn’t prepared to do.
He was still the cherubic blond baby of his mother’s.
I was the girl who lived on Red Rose Way. The street where there is supposed to be true love.
I was the girl who believed everything men said to me.
He had said he wanted to plant his seed inside me.
He had lied.
“I don’t want you spoiling Christmas for your grandparents,” Mother said.
As far as she was concerned I had taken care of it.
On her deathbed, under the spell of morphine, I said, “You never saw yourself as a grandmother did you?” She said “No.”
My mother was of the generation that had Andy Warhol.
That Christmas in 1981 my little brother and I were to take the train to Cambria, so our family could have Christmas. You will never know how strong you have to be for your family, until it is needed. You will also never understand why you had to put on a happy face as if nothing bad had happened.
As the train rumbled up the coast, I couldn’t say anything to my brother about what I had just gone through. He was too young. To this day, I wish I had had an older brother. This is what the men at work would become for me. Like Big Brothers. That is what Alan was to me.
We think of storks as the things that come with babies like miracles wrapped in swaddling clothes. There are myths we live out. There are also fairytales.
I was the girl on Red Rose Way who walked under Storke’s bells.
Up in his tower, I sat the books that held the millions of words.
They were bound books, every newspaper that had ever run.
I climbed the stairs all the time to see them.
The panic attacks began in my mother’s car, as we drove home to Santa Barbara after that Christmas. A bee flew into her car, and at the time, I was afraid of bees, as I had been stung once, as a very young child. Suddenly I could not breathe. My hands curled into little blue claws as there was no oxygen, coming in. I wasn’t breathing.
He put me through that.
And he still kept driving up.
He kept on sending postcards as if he were making a piece of Performance Art, like Chris Burden.
That’s what he was doing.
He had no plans to give me up and I couldn’t breathe anymore. There was nothing left.
He had killed my heart.
Or so I thought.
Perhaps, my heart did not die, for it is the strongest organ that I have.
It is always with my heart that I have traveled this world.
I was the girl who lived on Red Rose Way, and I was the girl who wore her heart on her sleeve.
I was the girl who lived on Red Rose Way who thought she had met her second Prince Charming. The first one had not been.
I was the 22 year old they gave Xanax to. Harold was on it too.
Harold, the best boss in the world.
I walked between the Pacesetters, under his watch.
They were spitting out film.
They were spitting out thousands of letters, whole alphabets put together out of the people who were busily typing upstairs on the Third Floor, they had come down the pneumatic tubes, and been retyped and marked up in the Composing Room.
I was becoming a Journeyman Printer.
“Harold, I can trim the type.”
“No, you job is to bring the type to the hooks.”
“But I can do more than one thing, Harold.”
“No, you are doing your job.”
And so I had gone from being the girl that came from Fashion, through Classified Accounting, into a Switchboard Operator, to a Proofreader, and finally I was on my way to the Floor.
That’s how important all of us were.
That’s how hard we worked to make everything true and perfect, at the newspaper.
It had won the Pulitzer.
It had belonged to T. M. Storke.
Copyright 2021 Newspaperpeople by Adrienne Wilson – Nanowrimo 2021 – all rights reserved
The problem with letting somebody so close to your heart in the way you might at say 22, is that you don’t know what kinds of wounds they might be carrying. You don’t know if they plan to napalm your soul. Because they had seen it. The Napalm.
Don’t choose somebody older than you if you can help it, although the heart always makes its own path doesn’t it?
This is going to get worse the older you get because you might have to carry a body so filled with the wounds that men might have inflicted, or that women might have inflicted you no longer even know what you might be holding.
It’s a heart.
It’s a heart that once was young and bright and skipped or skipped stones.
A heart that rode bicycles that switched to cars later.
All hearts on earth, have paths.
It’s the path of the heart that you will remember most.
Choose the path filled with flowers.
Choose the path with the least tears.
Choose the path that makes you laugh.
“I always drop acid before I make any important decisions,“ he says, bouncing along the beach at Thousand Steps. Just below Red Rose Way.
That was the day I told him.
“Now what,” he said. “I’ll pay for it.”
A girl, sitting in a beige carpeted empty apartment will have her first lesson. It’s the most painful lesson she will ever learn.
She will have nowhere to turn.
It happened the week he had off.
“We can spend the whole week together,” he said. “She’s going to be in Washington, on business.”
The he had the nerve to treat you like his wife, cooking in your sandy little kitchen. What was it he made then?
Brunswick Stew.
You looked out to sea, and the poems began to form, as poems always form. One word after another. You never imagined you would be like Hemingway one day, looking back at hills like white elephants, in the snow capped frost of winter.
He destroyed you that year.
He thought he could take Christmas, but he didn’t.
Maybe he thought you’d just off yourself.
He must have been used to offing people.
The struggle to breathe overtakes you in the doctor’s office out at Student Health. They offer Xanax and teach you how to breathe into a brown paper bag, if the panic attacks start in again.
And the postcards kept coming, daily, and there wasn’t going to be anywhere you could turn, and you realize that even now, some girl is in your position trapped butterfly-like against a wall, with a guy who was just using her as if she was a cotton cloud.
It’s the magic of other hearts that will hold you.
Strangers at work, all smiles, walnut desks, flirtatious males. You weave in and out of a landscape made of words, letters strung together on chains, paper chains, presses rolling, clanks and thumps.
We were the biggest Romantics in the world, once.
We were the ones who didn’t have to go to war at nineteen.
You think that women will be just like you, don’t you?
We aren’t.
“Take this fucking thing out,” he said, pulling the diaphragm from inside you. “It’s in my way.”
“Don’t” I said, hands trying to fend off what he was doing.
“I want to plant my seed inside you,” he said.
Over and over all that week.
The week he played house with you in your purple kimono, all curly and pretty and damp and he told you he didn’t love his wife anymore.
Maybe you should have taken it as a warning that day at LACMA, where he showed you Back Seat Dodge.
Years later your breath engulfs you.
You surface, no longer undersea.
The tail of a mermaid has grown, you carry a knife. Your knife is made of letters, thousands. and thousands of letters. Your power? They always have one for you, when you turn your eyes on them.
Then you will smile.
You can use the words to tell him how much you hated him.
Margaux, late 60’s the dayside proofreader. She slips sexily on cork wedgies through the room and you are only 22 when you start as the night proofreader. The other girl quit, and suddenly you are making $10.00 an hour in the Composing Room. It happened so fast that your salary doubled, because you were in a Union. They called them associations in those years. The men you had known as friends out in the tear stained lobby swept you into their world. There were other girls in there, and there were women upstairs who were reporters.
Suddenly it was fun to have all the art tools in your hands, again. You could see the men wearing them. Pica poles and rollers and exacto knives, triangles. It was going to be graphic art, and you had studied that. Font after font. You learned the names of those.
“Come on in here, Andreean,” Gabe says. Margaux will show you what you need to know. On your desk, her desk, there are dictionaries, there are books covering every word you will ever need to know, and there is the AP Stylebook. That’s how important it all was once. There are baskets on your desk. Margaux shows you the marks, and you learn these by heart. Margaux dresses like Flashdance, a tiny little bird, with wicked dancing eyes. She misses nothing in the room full of men. It’s fun for her, you notice.
This is where you will learn not to ever make a mistake.
Because it’s too important.
“Good catch,” the reporters say.
Especially when you, just a college girl, question phrases. Gabe is too important to ever let down.
You loved him as a boss, and you loved Harold. your other boss.
Gabe with a smile like the very best gelato.
Harold and his spiked Christmas punchbowls.
The typists cluck in their corner like hens, pecking the keys. Those are the women, and they are set into roles, most are mothers except one or two strays. Most everyone is married, except for one or two, or you. The difference is that only one of them has gone to college. All of them had gone immediately to work after High School, like you had, because that was all there was going to be for you, right?
Marriage, like a cotton cloud.
We all knew it.
We all wanted it, but just not quite yet.
The romantics were much younger in spirit than most.
That most of us might end up as DINKS was something we did not know yet.
It wasn’t what we had in mind, actually.
We wanted to fall in love. We wanted children.
There were millions of us.
Millions upon millions upon millions and millions.
Millions of our hearts shattered into glass splinters after 1973.
They used that as a back up for their mistakes. All the men who had no intention of being fathers. Men who used women just to get laid. That was that.
That’s all they wanted.
American girls.
Millions and millions of American girls, hearts felled.
Hearts, the petalled hearts, falling, tears running red, rivers of red, streams of red, oceans of red.
To men we were just a joke,
Just a series of little dishrags.
Sharon was a farm girl, she dressed in chinos just like men. Her eyes were slits, hardened slits from the Valley. She had horses, there, maybe she still lived at home, for all I knew. The women were mean. Not the ones in Editorial, the women who worked int he bowels of the building, down with all the dirty, greasy, men. They took it out on each other, and I watched this with horror, coming from Fashion as I had.
I wonder what they must have thought of me?
Thierry Mugler Jellies.
Kenzo oversized shapeless forms, cueing zen.
Sex wasn’t going to be part of the game with me.
She hated me.
“College girl,” she sneered.
The first night I sat down to proofread.
The first night I made my marks.
The first night I consulted the AP Stylebook.
In the basket, every story in the world passed through.
You will never know the responsibility that all of us had.
My job was to read everything in the baskets, and then, after the typists had typeset the story, to read it again, so that the story was perfect. You did this by compare and contrast.
Line by line, letter by letter.
The terror of making a mistake.
The terror of letting Harold and Gabe down.
The terror of seeing that in print the following day, at the place that I called home, with all the people I worked next to.
Soon he wasn’t going to be able to call me anymore.
Still the postcards came.
“There will never be a last postcard.”
The way he did that one, was write one word on each image, so they came like this:
THERE
WILL
NEVER
BE
A
LAST
POSTCARD.
I never want you to be a girl that has to stand on her own two feet. I want you to find a really sweet boyfriend that is your age.
I want you to choose that shy boy, the one that has poems he knows how to write for you. I want you to choose that pimple covered boy in High School who is going to take you to the prom. I want you to be wearing his corsage. I want you to fumble around making out, but you won’t go all the way unless you have birth control. I want you to know that he loves you. I want you to have a baby.
I want to see you dancing on a cotton cloud, under the moon in all her sweeping starlit curves. When he kisses you, I want to see you surrounded by stardust. I want to see you in the ballgowns, the pretty dresses, with the pimple-faced poet beside you. The one who can hardly speak because he is so taken with everything about you.
Don’t let him go.
Newspaperpeople by Adrienne Wilson copyright November 5th, 2021 – all rights reserved NaNoWriMo 2021
On the phone you cried to Jim, over and over about what a mistake you had made. He was a friend, leftover from what was the dawn of adulthood. He had rescued you once before, the night after your first relationship ended, and you had come home.
Pam lived with Carlos at his mother’s house down on Bath, she was in love so madly those years, with his Aztec everything. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other in that little living room and she had told you you could spend the night there. It never crossed your mind that that wouldn’t be possible, but after the double date, you looked over at Jim and he said, “I’ve got a place we can go.”
That night I took a chance.
We slept together, two 21 year olds, in an empty apartment where he had been crashing with Jeffy. Two party boys, on the cusp of growing up. The condo was totally empty, only a mattress on the floor. I can’t remember the bedding, just that there was sea of red carpet, and the two of us fell into each other’s arms that night. Students.
Jeffy bounced in – that morning after. He was a Montecito party boy, Jim’s best friend. So was Carlos.
“Hey you two,” he bounced. All the spiral curls he had. I pulled the sheets up over my head. I was the girl who was adult before my time. My first boyfriend was a grown man. Jim was safe. It was because of the second boyfriend that I called him again. We’d been talking ever since we both started college, he at UCSB, and I Santa Monica College. I was embarrassed that morning with Jeffy. I was the kind of girl who only liked one man at a time. I’m still that way.
Friends are people who stay friends across years falling in and out of touch. The next day, he taught me to drive a stick, in that glamorous green Triumph he drove, down in the parking lots by the harbor. When I think of that smiling blond face, even across years, I see us then, just starting off. Just kids, just two fatherless kids trying to navigate our futures.
“Let’s go out for breakfast,” he said.
“Get out of here,” he said to Jeffy.
Jim’s mother was a real estate agent, and her husband was gone. Her squat ranch on the Mesa had to house all her kids, four of them, and they were all leaving for their own lives. She rented out rooms to college kids, and Jim said, “You can live up here and go to UCSB, with me.”
I handed his mother a check for $300.
I was leaving Los Angeles, I was leaving all my teachers, I was leaving him. That man I was in love with. My married Art teacher. The one who handed the roses off to me, nearly daily. I was accepted into UCSB. I told my mother. And then I was going. I was leaving into the unknown future that awaited me back in the town where I grew up. I had friends there, like Jim and Pam and Carlos, and by then I knew Stevie B, and I knew it was going to be fun, and I was going to be a grown up at last. I was smart enough to know I had to leave that relationship.
I wasn’t prepared for what would happen next though.
“Mark and I will move you up. Start packing,” Jim said.
What did I actually have then?
Very little. I was living in my mother’s house.
Mark was Jim’s mechanic. He only worked on English cars, like Jim’s. The day I left Los Angeles for good, the day they were putting my very few adult-to-be girlboxes in the back of Mark’s Land Rover, I put my cat Alladin in the car in his little cage, on top of my clothes. I had him, my little rescue Persian, with the watery magnificent eyes. So, I had the most important thing. Something to love, who could love me back with his purrs, and moods. Perhaps I have always been a rescuer of sorts. Maybe that is what my life has been about. All I can tell you now is to be very careful if you plan to rescue people. The rescuer always becomes a victim. I guess I had to learn that the hard way, and I don’t want it to happen to you.
My Art teacher walked by us that day. He dropped a long stemmed red rose into one of the boxes, as he passed.
I saw the flash of his brown leather jacket go by, down Barrington. I ran after him to say goodbye.
“Is that the guy?” Jim said, frowning.
I had tears in my eyes. You are only going to actually fall in love a few times in life. I say this now, so you won’t make mistakes like I did. Years later I remember the day I told him I was leaving. He photographed me, my eyes full of tears, hands full of all his dried roses.
Then we were gone. Jim and Mark and I, heading north, only about 100 miles, but the safety I felt. I had escaped with the help of a chivalrous friend. I had left all of my friends, all of my teachers, and even my mother in the swirling eddy that is the city of Los Angeles. I had also left my job and I was about to get a new one. The first thing I did was apply for a job at the paper, I did that the very next morning. For my generation, jobs were our identities, and so was going to college.
I met Jim’s mother that night, in all her billowing Aussie caftan. She was large and harsh and in the middle of a hard part of her life as a single parent. Jim was her baby, the last of her children, daughters already married or moved on.
“You can use this shelf for your food,” she said. Her arms sweeping the air. “I know girls like you. Your hair is going to clog up all my plumbing.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said.
I went to my room, and I called my mother.
How many times will you need to call your mother? Millions.
I did. That night, when Jim knocked at my door, I knew I had to go. He expected that he had a built in girlfriend, under his mother’s roof. We had already slept together once, hadn’t we? We had been telephone friends since that year of 21, only. Maybe, because for men it is different, when it comes to sex, he thought, well I saved her didn’t I?
But that isn’t how it goes for girls. We fall in love so hard, or at least I did, that when I was in love there is only that man. It would have been impossible that night. I was too sad. I don’t think I was ever that lonely for someone in my life. Because he was an artist and so was I. Modotti and Weston. Steiglitz and O’Keefe. By then, I had my own Nikon. I bought it myself.
I was so in love that all I could think about was him.
But I couldn’t call him.
That was one of the rules.
Never call his house.
He called me from pay phones in little booths all over Los Angeles.
This was going to get worse after I had my job, because I gave him my number there.
Four dozen long stemmed roses arrived at Jim’s mother’s house. She thought they were for her. The first of the postcards was attached.
“He thought of her.”
I decided to move that night.
I could not let Jim in.
I probably cried all night that night holding Alladin.
What had I done?
I was so in love with that man it is hard to write it even now.
Because we were artists.
The bond of love with someone is very hard to break. Very hard.
My best friend Pam was in love and living with Carlos at his mother’s. She intended it to last. Jim was single. He was in his sowing wild oats phase, so young just 22. I was in love with a married Art teacher and he was 100 miles south of me, and I looked up into the night stars, hunting for the moon in any slim curve she might take. The scent of Jim’s mothers Hawaiian Ginger wafted in from the garden behind her tract house by the sea. I held Alladin in my arms, tightly after getting off the phone, and I told Jim, “No.”
I had a job!
“Mom, I got a job, “ I said. My first week back home and I had a new job. In the biggest place in town. The most imposing place in town, and I was going to be walking under Storke Tower. I was going to start UCSB Winter Quarter 1981. I had transferred up, and I was going to one of the finest Universities in California.
I had the simplest job in mind, so I had applied for Cashier. In the lobby full of Walnut desks, the sea of faces who greeted me, smiling.
“You have too much experience to be only a cashier, “ said Mr. Plet.
“We want you in Classified Accounting.”
That’s how I met Rosie and Cathy and Toni, and all the other girls who had desks in offices in 1981, and maybe by then we had all been in love for the first time and all of us had jobs.
Rosie smiled at me and led me to my desk, which was huge and antique, in the way all the desks were. Imposing, as was the paper itself. I was taken on a tour to see all the different departments and I was a very small cog in a very large wheel that kept tabs on everything. I knew how to use an adding machine, from my job in Fashion. Rosie told me about the five girls who had had the job before and they had all walked out. I was determined not to fail them, so I sat down to a mountain of pink pages. The billing hadn’t been done for something like five months. It took me several weeks to catch it all up, working nine to five, and all of us had weekends off. I have never met so much kindness on the job as I met in all those people in the sea of faces at the newspaper. They saved my life, once. How can I ever thank them for those years, of Mr. Plet and Mr. Sykes and the way they helped a young college girl begin at UCSB? How can I ever thank what was once the throbbing heartbeat of a town?
*author note – copyright Adrienne Wilson November 22, 2021 all rights reserved
ps: thank you Matt of WP and Nanowrimo for making the two best places for writers ever.
Okay so like I do not have the time to learn to use Pages, and my WP Blog has served me well, so well and for so long that, this is just easiest.
Fed Ex can handle the print out.
So I am adapting a short story that I wrote in 2013 for ERWA called Vanilla Suede that they put in the Treasure Chest. It’s a real little shorty and totally dialogue but as I was writing it, and now that I think about it, that might have been the year that Walter Dallenbach had passed away and so the PLAY “Vanilla Suede” is FOR Walter, just as Heart of Clouds was writ for Walter Davis based on the title of his “Do You Remember Love” which won a Humanitas. In 2006 when I saw that prize on his mantel at a party I almost keeled over. Well I was a therapist you know? That is HUGE. So anyway, Vanilla Suede is just dialogue, that my editor Bob Buckley taught me to write and I was able to do as he did, with all his dialogue pieces as Flash Fiction. He is so very dear to me. Always. So anyway I am breaking my words into three scenes and all morning I grasped a new understanding of “spectacle” and what that means for set design. So this is really simple in some ways.
— I am breaking up the story into three distinct scenes. The first scene starts at a funeral where two old friends who have known each other for years meet up at the death of a mutual friend. These are my MC’s Trent and Marina – they are older – mid 50s or? But the essence of these two characters is that they have lived in long marriages and are now divorced, but, hesitant to get involved with anyone else. So I know that I wrote the shorty with Aristotle’s Poetics. Even as thinly as the dialogue is! — we used to write to 1200 words sometimes in my genre at ERWA so this is one of those shortys. And I want to use a very minimalist style to present this. Painting the props myself and I only need like three. It’s set to Glenn Miller “Moonlight Serenade, and that will be the second part of the scene.and I am just going to do this here because can access right at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference.
So where I am going to break the text and how that will look.
The PLAY VANILLA SUEDE = three scenes.
SCENE #1
THE MOURNERS
There is a dark stage and as the lights come on dimly lit, “DARK” we see maybe seven people standing in a circle the mourners are EXTRAS in a sense because this is the only line ONE OF THEM will say.
EVERYONE IS HOLDING A FLOWER to symbolize putting a flower on a GRAVE. ONE BY ONE silently and with great care, EACH MOURNER places A FLOWER at the base of the tombstone until we hear “GONE TOO SOON” by the last mourner, who shakes his head, sadly and slowly back and forth. The mourner’s FACES all hold the sadness one sees at the loss of someone dear.
The mourners recede into darkness, BY ONE BY ONE WALKING BACKWARDS AND UPSTAGE until THEY EXIT STAGE LEFT ONE BY ONE, and the LIGHTS now move to a spotlight on the faces of my two MC’s. TRENT AND MARINA.
SO, NEW LINE = “TAKEN TOO SOON” as said by one of the mourners.
Now we hear TRENT say to MARINA the next part. This is a play for TWO PEOPLE.
We see TRENT and MARINA as the last of the mourners, when he says: “Sometimes you just need to be held,” ——– This line is where my shorty started.
SCENE #2
TRENT and MARINA are now the last mourners left at the site of the grave but we DO NOT NEED TO SEE TOMBSTONE, so lights are just ON THEM.
In this part the conversation between them is about the 1920’s, as in the shorty. However I am going to make another break in the action here so – I have to move them from Marina talking about the Halloween Party and her grandparents to the TWO OF THEM deciding they are going to go to the party together. Also work in the EE and I have thought how to do that. TRENT can have a book of EE’s poems on the set on a table. In this part, MARINA can say, “Oh, you have read ee, and Trent will say, “YES.” Then she will say, “Oh I have a fave poem of his.” So what has happened here is that there is going to be a LOVE SCENE with the BALCONY involved. They have decided to go to the Halloween Party together. But we never see the Halloween party.
SCENE TWO is at TRENT’S APT and in this scene is where we will see the DANCE SCENE so this goes in where he says, “HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THIS” —- enter the Miller SOUNTRACK on Moonlight S.
This is also the part where MARINA will read EE poem.
SCENE THREE IS BALCONY LOVE SCENE I AM EDITING.
I think this is a one act play in two scenes? Not sure what to call it but Walter and Carmen will know.
SETS #1 TOMBSTONE AND MOURNERS
SET #2 TRENT APT DANCE SCENE
SET #3 LOVE SCENE ON BALCONY BEHIND BALUSTRADE (hidden from aud) just hear the voices and the lines.
FINALE- the lights turn into the stars! ❤ How is that for a spectacle!!! ha!
Here is a link from my old blog Valentine Bonnaire (my nom de plume) for when I wrote Vanilla Suede for ERWA, it may have run in September that year? So. 2013. ERWA changed hands at some point, so here I talked about writing it and there is a picture of the shoe and music link. I was writing Suede Shoe Stories, at that time. Pink Suede, Green Suede, Red Suede and Vanilla Suede. You will see Red Suede in the archives at ERWA if you feel like it.
*author note, sadly Walter passed in 2014, so I wrote this before that but, the play Vanilla Suede that is SBWC 2019 is dedicated to my screenwriting teacher, the magnificent Walter Dallenbach. The match scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia.
Really happy about Nano this year.
Adrienne Wilson 
