The Week in Review

This has been one of those weeks that bull dozes time. Been a busy week with the day job and Wood Sugars shows, with of course some after show boozing that made the early mornings the next day a little rough to get the day flowing. Our MILF show on Wednesday had a great turnout, with a quite a few randoms. Thursday's "One Night Only Show" was a lower turn out but I had a blast. We all drank some red wine before the show. I feel a bit funnier, loser the roll with the give and take of comedy performance with red wine trickling in my blood. After we went to a bar called Simon's with a weird old Swedish feel to it. I liked it. I had a little too many cans of cheap Genessee beer, I hadn't heard of it before but it was on sale and my wallet is thin so I gave it a shot. It tasted nice. But I felt a bit ill the following morning. When I arrived home after intense thunderstorms crackled.

My screenplay of Whiskey Pike unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round of the Nicholls Fellowship I had entered it into. Out of almost 7,000 entries 350 were selected for the final round of judging. I was certainly bummed but I spent some time looking back over the script yesterday and I certainly understand its imperfections. At the time I had submitted it I felt jacked that it was quite incredible but with my latest review of it, a little time and space between my last tear into, I do find there are a lot of fluff moments. I have the piece littered with little transitions, montage between scenes to show travel, whiskey biz development, etc. And on closer inspection these things are really just fat which at the time I thought would build a swell visual sprawl of the old time, wilderness landscape. And when it comes down to it a lot of that stuff is understood. And I'm again reminded that film is really tied together with the most important moments.

So I spent some time reworking it, and in a way I've been wanting to do for some time. I'm definitely interested and determined to shoot this thing out in the woods in the 5 year plan. Whereas I certainly don't think this piece will necessitate millions of dollars, being essentially a period piece, it's going to have some costs. And with film, its like holding up a microscope to the detail, which requires more money to fine tune that set and costuming detail. But being a theatre guy, having spent a majority of my time in Chicago studying theatre and putting on plays, my biggest interest in the production is the element of performance. The characters, the dynamic between the Bowermaster family members and most particularly the rivalry between Shane Bowermaster and George the Brewer, incited the new impulse in me to extract and piece together the scenes which focus on these relationships to develop what can an intense theatre piece that can still translate under a low budget. With theatre such period elements of costuming and set can be more representational and with the right lighting can take you to that place with more punch of ambiance perhaps film even can.

So this is my latest experiment with the Whiskey Pike script, tentatively titled The Whisky Infused Boom of Shane Bowermaster. I know I've gone back and forth quite a bit on whether I want to do this as a play or a film or what not. Sure I'm flip-floppy like a politician here, but it is an ambitious piece, and I want to make sure I put some good thought into how I want to commit to the first production of the piece. My next motion is to begin work-shopping the piece with actors and work towards doing a public staged reading of it in the near future to really hone the project.

This week I've also been getting pulled into watching CNN and CSPAN and MSNBC to follow the whole debt ceiling crisis. It's been like a riveting soap opera. We'll see what the dramatic conclusion is. As of this writing I hear there is McConnell bill that is "close".

For a Fistful of Sweat

A week that flew by leads me to a Sunday morning eating waffles (homemade from a waffle iron) and watching For A Fistful of Dollars on AMC. Sometimes I dig certain movies because I want their imagery to infuse itself in my dreams. Monday I spent time with some good college friends, one of whom has been in Africa for the past several years, having been in the Peace Corps in Zambia, and having created a life for herself in South Africa post corps. Very proud of her for her worldliness. I wish plane tickets to that part of the world weren't so pricey, as I'd love to see the world she has spoken of in stories. Waterfalls, lions, oh my. Wednesday we kicked off our latest Wood Sugars show M.I.L.F (Mothers Incredible Local Funnies) now going on Wednesdays at The Original Mothers bar in Chicago, by Rush and Division. It was a swell turn out, and many laughs were induced. Last minute I had to jump on light/sound board for one of the other sketch groups, and not having operated any such board since probably 1999 I was a little nervous. But the nerves kept my timing alert enough to not fuck it up. Had some late nights this week with the show, another Wood Sugars recording session, and some late night work revising my latest novel manuscript. By Friday night I was ready to chill, convincing my girlfriend to make chicken and waffles for dinner, and I later made popcorn. I crashed at 10pm hoping to grab, I was hoping, a 12 hour sleep, yet I awoke at 2:30am with massive heartburn. It was like a middle eastern riot in my belly. That easily stole 2 hrs from my slumber, and I was out of Wal-zan 150, and tums. All I had was old pepto-bismol tablets in the medicine drawer that had expired in 2008. I took them anyway because I was desperate. So this and my energy levels got me to thinking about getting some real exercise to help reduce stress, make my sleep more productive, speed the ol' metabolism, and in general give me a little more cardio vascular stamina. So I went for a run on Saturday afternoon and broke a very good sweat, ran for 2 miles! Which is nothing but considering it has been over a year since I went running that was not just a short print to catch the bus, I feel good about it and am going to try to keep it up a few times a week.

I also completed draft 2.1 of my latest novel on Saturday and am happy with it to a point of comfort in bouncing it around for some reader perspective before my next round of revisions that I want to finalize in September. If anyone is interested in giving the manuscript a read, I'd be more than happy for some outside perspective and critiques.