The clear skies of early morning yesterday quickly disappeared. When Her Highness and I went for our morning walk, it was under rather threatening skies, but we got home dry and uplifted by the thrill of a morning forest walk. I love walking the trails in the morning. The scents are heavenly. It was a great start to our day.
By 11:00 am it was raining. I had a nap. I have no idea why I felt so tired, but I wanted to be in good form when my guests arrived for dinner. Dave wrote to say that Grey was staying home as he has a cough. It freaked me out to hear it, so I wrote back asking them to take a Covid test before going ahead with the dinner. They did, and all tests were negative. Thank God! I’d made so much food.
Dinner was good, they loved every course until I served dessert, my beautiful nectarine and almonds tart, and after one taste, and I tasted it immediately because I love eating my tarts, I was disgusted. I stopped everyone from eating. The almonds were horribly off. But in every other way, they loved being together in a home (not their trailer; they still haven’t got their development permit) and my food.
We had a great time, telling stories, but I talked way too much. I found I was fluent in their company, and I talked and talked and talked. I’m going to apologize. It’s understandable, given that I was as fluent as I was last night. They are great people and we had lots of fun, so I’m sure they’ll understand. Lesson learned, however.
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I have begun writing the second monologue. Almost with every word I think: Am I going to memorize all this? Am I nuts? But I love writing and I know that I have a good story that works excellently with Rhyme & Rhythm. It’s going to give me hundreds of hours of enjoyment to get it into a stable written form.
I love writing dialogue for scripts I’ve written. It’s the closest to fiction writing as I can get. And I loved writing songs with my friend, Bruce. One was, to my taste, worthy of professional production. I still know the lyrics, but this boy don’t sing. And I love, love, love writing these non-fiction monologues. These are forms of writing I never did when I was technical writing. Plus, there’s no client approval or deadline issue, so I could say that writing has never been more fun. Writing, since retiring at age 57, is so much fun. (And my textbook earned me a surprising amount of money from sales and public speaking. Lucky, I got that done before I lost my voice—except for last night.)
When it comes to me doing these two monologues together, I have these thoughts. One: There’s going to be someone at each performance, provided by the sponsor, who will play charades with the audience for 10 minutes, while I get a rest before the second monologue. Also, to ensure that both my friend, Beth, and I, are calm, I’m going to see if I can have someone off stage operating an iPad, remotely, that I could have with me on stage as a prompter.
Both are powerful personal and emotional stories performed by a person with a disability, overcoming their disability live, before their eyes. I’ve concocted a powerful script and theatrical experience by putting these stories together. I think the end result of the dialogues will be the same as has been my experience with Rhyme & Rhythm. People like it; I can feel it from them that they are sincere.
I used to joke-to-provoke that readers were people who couldn’t write. I thought writing was the active form of literacy. Reading, so passive, was for pussies. I’m joking of course, but writing can be incredible fun sometimes. I think I like the structure rhyme provides. It feels satisfying all the time, like solving a puzzle. And it’s like math, the rhyme is there, or it isn’t. There’s no grey.
I look forward to having something interesting to write about. I plan to share bits as I develop them. Right now, I am working on a part of the story that concerns orphans. I’m trying to list a long list of orphans—in a rhyming structure. I absolutely love this challenge, it’s hard and it’s the first thing I wanted to do.
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This morning, I found myself able to speak aloud on my own. I got very excited that I might be ‘cured.’ I should have known better, but last night and at home this morning, I felt capable of fluence. Last night I was fluent, and for hours. But when I took Her Highness for our morning walk, I could not speak aloud. Not cured, but undaunted.
I spent a good five hours on the second monologue. I just love writing in rhyme.
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