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Max and Margo

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The Brief

Pick a number! Any number (as long as it’s between 1-60)

“What? Magic?! No way, dude!”

No! No magic! I don’t like magic! Unless it’s the magic that comes out of your magical fingers as you type today’s genius play!

No… just pick a number, any number (as long as it’s between 1-60)

Don’t you trust me? Just trust me. It’s not magic. I swear.

Just pick it.

The number.

Any number (as long as it’s between 1-60).

Good!

Now… check the link below

Don’t cheat! First pick the number and only then look at the link.

WHAT CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE?!

Good, now find the corresponding thing to your number and write about that!

Go wild!

For bonus points – incorporate the number with the corresponding thing and marry them into something uniquely extraordinary

 

The Excerpt

The number I picked was 19, by the way.

CHARLIE:      I was thinking tomorrow.

MAX:              Your mom’s making pot roast tomorrow, isn’t she.

CHARLIE:      Well… she claims it’s pot roast.

MAX:              (to MARGO) Charlie’s mom is the worst cook. Everything she makes tastes like cardboard. But her pot roast? Her pot roast tastes like regurgitated cardboard.

MARGO:        Oh, gross! (to CHARLIE) You, know, I think it would be better for your health if you had Mongolian beef tonight and stuck to mac-n-cheese tomorrow.

KENT:            And this is why we love Margo. She has much wisdom.

MAX:              Yup. That’s why I love Margo.

 

To Read the Entire Play…

Click here: 1902.03 – Max and Margo

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Stormy Weather: A Relationship in Three Short (Rhyming) Acts

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The Brief

Coz every year we do poetic briefs –

To do with either rhythm or with rhyme…

But this is now the fifth month of our game

So this year we’ll do both, I think it’s time.

We’ll take some inspiration from the Bard

But mix it up so that we do it new.

We’ll write a play that’s all Iambic Pents,

but also make it rhyme, we must that do!

“what sort of rhyming pattern should we use?”

I hear you ask with panic in your voice

Well, you can choose whatever fits you best

That’s right, you have the power – make your choice!

Right, that’s the easy part, and now the trick,

the language must remain ‘au natural’

Do place the play in modern times and themes

Maybe even make it factual.

I don’t want any mention of old Will

or texts that could be taken from his plays

No themes that maybe he has written ’bout

instead deal with our lives these modern days.

So write about things Shakes-boy couldn’t write

Like Mars bars, Gogglebox or World War II.

I hope you like this challenge, my dear friends

I think it’s fine. I do. I do. Do you?

 

The Excerpt

The sound you’re hearing is just a branch on the roof

I’ll show you in the morning if you require proof.

I love that your dreams are never boring,

And that you think of ships at sea when you hear me snoring.

But right now, I’m so tired I almost feel like I am dead,

So maybe drive the Master and Commander novels from your pretty head

Cuz all too soon our dogs will bark and growl and whine and peep

And we’ll have lost all chance of ever getting any sleep.

 

To read the entire play…

Click here: 1902.02 – Stormy Weather – A Relationship in Three Short Rhyming Acts

trippylococatsbyfran

Art Therapy for Maturing Divas

by

trippylococatsbyfran

The Brief

As you know, we are now called The Literal Challenge or TLC – so to celebrate that, let’s write a play about TLC.

“What? Second challenge and all you’re giving us are letters?! I expected far more!”

“Well, there is more! Loads more! In those three letters there is a whole range of possibilities”…

Perhaps set it in a spa, where customers receive special (!) TLC.

Perhaps write about a couple arguing about a Tables, Ladders and Chairs wrestling match (google it!).

What about a play consisting only of lyrics by the great band TLC, or just pick one of them – a monologue about a T-bone steak? About someone’s Left Eye? About eating a chilli? (This is far too early in the process for me to betray my age in such a way).

What about three characters talking but never using the letters T, L and C?

Or… go at it from a completely different angle. Take a hot bath and give your body some TLC as you free write (maybe don’t take any electronic devices though).

And of course – you could just write about THE LITERAL CHALLENGE!

 

The Exerpt

LUCY:             Impudent child. Tried to tell me there were rules. I told her I’d been cursing like a sailor before she’d been born and I wasn’t likely to stop any time soon, and when she’d been a    medic in a war zone she could maybe think about lecturing me. Fuck… was it knit six, perl three or knit five, perl two? (she begins ripping out stitches)

RED:               This is why you never complete anything.

DORIS:           It’s not about the finished project. It’s about the stimulation of the creative act. Making art is good for the brain.

RED:               We’re not ‘making art,’ we’re coloring in pictures. You’re just using a brush instead of pencils or crayons.

DORIS:           It is, too, art. I choose the brushstrokes. I choose the picture. And you, you select the colors you use. Or do you see a lot of cats striped pink and yellow?

 

To Read the Entire Play…

Click here: 1902.01 – Art Therapy for Maturing Divas

 

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Parched

by

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The Brief

Not sure why, but I’ve gone all nautical the last few days in my emails to you, so it seems appropriate that we use that for our first brief.

Ships, boats, water, blue, salt, sea, waves anything to do with this magnificent force.

…

Let’s start off easy (this is only the first challenge after all) – so write the play in the style you feel most comfortable in.

 

The Excerpt

Ordinary humans are told to drink 8 glasses of water a day, but that’s assuming eight-ounce glasses. Me? There are days when eight gallons barely quench my thirst. My husband makes good money, and my patreons on my podcast keep me in spending money, but you don’t want to know what our water bill is like. Some days… some days the ice machine can’t even keep up with me when it’s set to ‘party mode.’

 

To read the entire play…

Click here: 1901.31 – Parched

 

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2019: This Will Be Our Year

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The warmth of your love
Is like the warmth of the sun
And this will be our year
Took a long time to come
Don’t let go of my hand
Now darkness has gone
And this will be our year
Took a long time to come
I know I’m not the only person who was more than ready to kick 2018 out the door, and welcome in the promise of a new year.  Like a brand new pad of drawing paper, a brand new spiral notebook, a brand new computer with a virtually empty hard drive, a new year is a blank canvas, as yet untainted by politics or pain.
This last year, actually the year and change going all the way back to August 2017, has been a hard one for Fuzzy and me. We lost his mother, his father, and my stepfather. We also lost my last great-uncle, but that wasn’t a death that impacted me a great deal, except that I’m sad he was sick and suffering at the end.
And then there was my knee surgery.
While my mother was here, I was confronted with the fact that, as much as I’ve improved, I’m nowhere close to being completely healed. I found out earlier today that I did not make it into a writing residency I applied for, and my first reaction was not disappointment, but relief. I’m not ready, yet, to be traipsing around a walking city without Fuzzy’s help and support.
And I won’t forget
The way you held me up when I was down
And I won’t forget the way you said,
“Darling I love you”
You gave me faith to go on
And speaking of help and support, I want to thank all my friends and family who have been with me on the journey through PT, and on the expanded journey of this podcast. Five years ago, when Nuchtchas told me about the Dog Days of Podcasting, I thought no one would care what I wrote, or listen to what I had to say. I’d probably have more listeners than Nutty and my mom if I bothered to make regular episodes (goal for 2019 – one a month) or tell people about it (like many people, I’m great at pushing other people’s art, and really bad at sharing my own), but the act of creation is often its own reward.
So, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you to ALL the dog days participants – those who did only August, and those who did something in December as well. Your comments, your mentions, your willingness to participate when I ask for volunteers – those mean so much. And your own podcasts make me smile, laugh, think, and wish I were on the ocean. This includes you Michael Butler – I listen to every episode. Really. I’m not naming any other names because I don’t want to miss anyone.
But also thank you to my other friends – Debra, Becca, Clay, Jancis, Fran, Selena, KM, Stones, Katie, OC, the entire Klingon Marauders fleet on Timelines, my cousins, Michelle, Kerrin, David, and Shirley, and my husband’s aunt Kathy. My own aunties, Patricia and Dee, and my local friends Kathy, Scott, Ben, Ian, Kimberlyn, and Trenton. You’ve listened to me whine, laughed when I was funny, provided encouragement when I needed it, and generally just been there.
And a special shout-out to my Mom. Because even though we push each others buttons the way only a mother and daughter can, she’s still my hero.
To the people who read my stuff wherever it’s posted and published, to the people who listen, to the people who just ARE.
Thank you.
Now we’re there and we’ve only just begun
This will be our year
Took a long time to come
In the poem “Story Water” Rumi wrote:

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

 

Thank you for sharing your stories, both fiction and not. I hope to hear more from you in 2019.

 

Thank you for listening to mine. I hope to share more in 2019.

 

This will be our year – all of us.

 

This will be our year
Took a long time to come

“This Will Be Our Year” was originally by The Zombies.
Entenmanns

The Eighth Day After – Coffee Cake

by

Entenmanns

 

The eighth day after Christmas, before they could suspect
I bundled up the…
Eight maids a-milking
Nine ladies dancing
Ten lords a-leaping
Eleven pipers piping
Twelve drummers drumming
(Well, actually, I kept one of the drummers)
And sent them back collect

I wrote my true love we are through love
And I said in so many words
Furthermore your Christmas gifts were for the birds

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

My earliest memories revolve around my grandmother’s dining table. Laughing aunts and uncles and cousins would sit around the table talking as loudly with their hands as they did with their voices. Some nights the Canasta cards were brought out, other nights the game was Pinochle or for us non-cardplayers, Scrabble was the game of choice. Inevitably though, whether there were two people at that table or twelve, my grandmother would announce that she wanted a ‘little something.’

Invariably that ‘little something’ would be dessert.

And more often than not, the dessert would be an Entenmann’s coffeecake. The kind with a crumb topping and pastry cheese filling. That taste, slightly metallic from the foil tray, but always just enough sweetness to temper the strongest of coffees (or the brattiest of little girls) was the taste of my childhood. I remember it as strongly as I do my grandfather’s raisin bread or my grandmother’s meatballs or her recipe for pasta e fagiolli, which, by the way, is nothing like the swill they serve at the Olive Garden.

For Christmas this year, my friend Fran in Massachusetts sent me not one, not two, but three Entenmann’s Cheese-filled Crumb Coffee Cakes. Two immediately went into the freezer, to be saved until I just can’t stand it anymore. The third, we cut into almost immediately. Even my mother, who doesn’t eat carbs (she says), couldn’t resist the siren call of this coffee cake.

You see, they don’t sell it in my part of Texas. Believe me, I’ve looked. And even in California, it was a rare thing to find.

They say you can’t go home again, but sometimes, home can come to you, and when it does, it’s packaged in a white and blue box.

 

 

 

 

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The Sixth Day After – Trains

by

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The sixth day after Christmas, the six laying geese wouldn’t lay
I gave the whole darn gaggle to the A.S.P.C.A
On the seventh day, what a mess I found
all seven of the swimming swans had drowned
My true love, my true love, my true love gave to me

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

Last night, lying in the too-hard bed in the Bossier City Hilton I heard two recurring sounds: my husband’s snoring (like many men, Fuzzy can fall asleep anywhere, even if he’s not actually tired), and train whistles.

After nudging my husband to make him roll over (and therefore stop snoring), I listened to the trains a while longer.

Train whistles never sound anything but mournful. My friend Stonefish says it’s just the physics of sound, but I think it’s more. I think there’s a romanticism associated with trains that never quite leaves us.

At least, that’s true in my family.

Some of my earliest memories involve setting up model trains – HO scale – with my grandfather, creating circuits of track on the sculptured red carpet of the living room, and using the controls to make them go forward and backward. Later, I would have access to a train room, with a high trestle and a low trestle and tiny towns made of cardboard and paint, and even a fake river to cross over via a swinging bridge.

As I grew older I began to appreciate real trains. I remember a really old train I rode with my grandparents, somewhere in rural Massachusetts one summer, when we were visiting my aunt – the seats were reversible, and there was a water fountain in the back of each car with a dispenser of paper drinking cones, and we were practically the only people on it. I was under ten, and to my young self, that ride was as magical as the Hogwarts Express.

And then there was the Georgetown Loop – a narrow gauge railroad in Colorado. We lived there when it opened as a tourist attraction in the 70’s and I loved to sit in the top of the caboose with my legs dangling over the side. (There’s a name for that seat, but I don’t remember it.)

Trains remain part of my life. I have some antique toy train cars in my writing room, and I have a model of the Hogwarts Express that is meant to go around my Christmas tree, but somehow never manages to do so (well, not in years).  I’m not sure I’ll ever fall out of love with trains, but I’m equally certain I’ll always think their whistles sound like someone crying in the night.

 

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The Third Day After – Louisiana

by

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The third day after Christmas, my Mother caught the croup
I had to use the three French Hens to make some chicken soup
The four calling birds were a big mistake for their language was obscene
The five golden rings were completely fake and they turned my fingers green.

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

I’m writing this tonight from the Hilton Garden Inn in Bossier City, Louisiana. We drove here earlier today so Mom could see her older sister for the first time since last October, and I got a suite for us plus a room for my mother (because none of us were willing to sleep on a sofa bed), but since we’re not staying in a casino, the rooms were really reasonable, and it’s only for one night. Why a suite? Because Mom is allergic to cats, and my aunt has cats, so having a suite meant after we left the restaurant (Gibbons – great food; reasonable prices) we had an allergen-free place to hang out and visit for a bit.

I had a pot of coffee sent to the room (literally, they sent an urn) and we shared one enormous slice of cheesecake, and it was a nice way to catch up without anyone having to wash a dish. I gave my aunt and uncle and cousin some Dude, Sweet Chocolate, which is possibly the best chocolate on Earth, and they gave us local coffee and biscotti, made by the people in the care home where my cousin is a nurse.

We’re meeting for brunch tomorrow, at a place we went to twice when we were here last year, and then heading home. Mom leaves for her home in La Paz, BCS, Mexico on Sunday morning, and I plan to spend Sunday sleeping and cuddling dogs.

For now, though, we’re in Louisiana, and we’re such wild people at at 10:30 at night on a weekend, all I want to do is shower and sleep.

 

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The Second Day After – Sheridan’s

by

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The second day after Christmas
I pulled on the old rubber gloves
And very gently wrung the necks
Of both the turtle-doves
My true love
My true love
My true love gave to me.

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

I’m not really a drinker. I have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which is autoimmune hypothyroid, and alcohol doesn’t mix well with Synthroid. One or two glasses of wine and I’m sleepy. When I had pneumonia earlier this month, my doctor asked me if I wanted cough medicine, but she knows I’m not fond of narcotics, and honestly I didn’t have much of a cough. I told her I was having hot toddies before bed, and she asked for my recipe, then said, “Truly, that’s healthier than codeine, so if it’s working for you, do that.”

And I did.

I like wine, even though I don’t drink a lot of it, and I like the occasional beer, but one of my favorite things to drink to take the edge off is something that was introduced to me at a Christmas party in Mexico: Sheridan’s.

Sheridan’s is an Irish whiskey-based liqueur. It comes in a double bottle that’s really two bottles fused together in a sort of abstract swan-shape. The bigger side is coffee-flavored whiskey, and the smaller side is a white chocolate liqueur, and when you pour it, you tilt the glass so it forms a layered drink like coffee with cream on top. It’s a little bit sweet, and a little bit like Bailey’s but also not at all like it.

And you can’t buy it in the states.

So every time I visit my mother in Mexico, I make sure to have enough pesos leftover to buy a bottle of Sheridan’s and a bottle of really good Tequila at the duty-free store in the Cabo airport. I prefer to use pesos because they give you a discount for using cash, but it’s also a good way to burn leftover pesos.

This year, mom came to me, so I paypal’d her the money to buy the Sheridan’s – I didn’t want to make her carry Tequila also.

I’m just finishing the bottle I bought on my last visit to Mexico, and the new one won’t be opened for a while.

But since I was introduced to it at Christmas, I consider it a holiday tradition, as much as eggnog is here in the US and rompope is in Mexico.

Cheers.

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The First Day After – Tree Toppers

by

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The first day after Christmas
My true love and I had a fight.
And so I chopped the pear tree down
And burned it just for spite.

Then with a single cartridge
I shot that blasted partridge
My true love
My true love
My true love gave to me.

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

It’s December 26th – the first day after Christmas – and I’ll be sharing a few things I didn’t get to during advent. Tonight, at the behest of my friend Nuchtchas of Nutty Bites, the subject is tree toppers.

I have two Christmas trees this year, and I still have a good portion of my ornaments in a box. My mother started my ornament collection before I was born, and we’ve added to it every year. Some of the ornaments represent places I visited or experiences I had during childhood, and some represent my interests and those of my husband, and some are just pretty or cool. Mom once told me that one of the saddest days she experienced – before the loss of her husband, anyway – was when she packed up my ornaments separately from hers for the first time, so I could have a tree of my own, after I married Fuzzy.

Two trees means two tree toppers. The main tree, which is seven-and-a-half feet tall and is in the dining room, has a traditional angel on top. For the longest time, when Fuzzy and I both worked nights doing tech support for Gateway, we had a gold moon as the topper, but as our marriage matured our trees grew in stature (well, we kept upgrading to larger ones) and the moon was soon relegated to normal ornament status. I bought the angel a few years ago because she seemed serene, and she reminded me of a Renaissance painting I’d seen once.

The auxiliary tree is in the part of my house that is technically the living room, but is really part of the space between the dining room doors, the front door, and the stairs, as the living room really begins beyond the door into the kitchen, and this all sounds more complicated than it is. Anyway, the living room tree is about three feet tall but it’s in a pot, on a table, so it feels taller. We put all the aquatic-themed ornaments on that. Mermaids, fish, shells, and also ducks, dragonflies, a crocodile, and an alligator in pink pumps with Christmas trees on her back.

The topper for that tree is a silver metallic butterfly, and it was the topper of the first tree Mom and I had together, so it’s as old as I am, and it looks surprisingly good for a forty-eight-year-old creation made of paper and pipe cleaners. Mom started downsizing her own ornament collection a few years ago, and sent that to me.

I have to admit, I resisted using it, because it felt like doing so meant she was dead, when in fact she’s very much alive, and sleeping in my guest room as I write this. I do use it though, because I love it, and because it catches the light really well, which our angel does not.