Happy Endings?

This once a week thing just doesn’t seem to be enough, but sadly, my life is extremely boring at the moment, so I don’t have much to share.

I think I’m very close to being employed full-time once again. That’s good news. I do love working at home, that will continue. And producing shows is great too, but I just have this need to be out of the house more. And making more money wouldn’t hurt. So if I land one of these jobs I’m interviewing for, that will give me: 1 full time job, 2 part time jobs. Add that to taking care of kids and boyfriend, and I’ll be lucky if I ever have time to myself again. Not complaining, not complaining.

I’m currently uninspired in writing my play. It’s dredging up some old, painful memories and I’m finding it hard to get excited about it. I love the title. I love the opening. I love the ending. I even love the break-up scene, some of my best writing I think. But I’m stuck, and I don’t know what to do.

I realize I’ve been terribly vague about the contents of my play. And at this point, I may even turn it into a screen play instead of something for the stage. The more I write it, the more I see difficulty in staging it in a small venue. But here’s just a little more detail: Let me just say that it’s not a comedy, although there are indeed some funny lines. It’s more of a love story, for modern times, which is very strange for me as I don’t normally buy into that sort of thing. I’ve written in some of my own experiences and given the main character a certain level of bitterness and cynicism, well-deserved and earned, of course, but she’s likeable. You go thru things with her, hoping that she will eventually be happy. And just when it looks like she will be, just when you think she’s finally found what she was looking for, things go south. It follows the very standard ‘girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back’ formula. A happy ending? Well, I don’t typically believe in happy endings, but I wrote one anyway.

Last nite I watched “Pay if Forward” for the very first time. I can’t believe I didn’t see this movie when it came out 6 years ago. What the hell was I doing? Who knows. It was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve never cried so much during a movie. “Philadelphia” had me pretty teary-eyed, but I was also pregnant with my son when I saw that one, so emotions were quadrupled. I cried when the people on the Titanic died. I even boo-hoo’d a bit when the Beast died in that Disney movie, even though I knew he was going to be ok. But this movie, damn. I must have burst into tears a half a dozen times. And even when it was over, I couldn’t seem to pull myself together. It was so good. Amazingly written and cast. I didn’t expect such a sad ending. Why it didn’t win a slew of awards, I’ll never know.

And the boyfriend laughs at me. Every time we watch a movie together and he hears me start to sniffle, he laughs. Not in a mocking way, not in a ‘god you’re so stupid’ way, but more of an ‘ahh, isn’t it sweet that you get so emotional in all the Pavlovian spots’ sort of way. Yeah. Pretty fucking sweet.

I don’t want to do that to people with my writing. I don’t ever want anyone walking away feeling like they just lost their best friend. So I guess I’ll stick with happy endings.