Cooking with Words and Spices

(Clockwise) Saffron Rice, Butter Chicken, Palak Paneer, Veggie Korma.

I met my friends John and Kay in 1972 when I started teaching in 1970. I quit teaching in 1972 and have seen Kay once since. John married Bunny and we have been intimates since meeting. This past weekend we all had dinner at my place (with little notice) after I got a surprise call from Kay who came to Vancouver to visit her brother.

My plan was to buy dinner because I am so focused on writing. (See below.) But I finished the draft of my screenplay and so I decided to cook Indian food. I used recipes from Madhur Jaffrey but the korma was not at all to my liking, so I rescued it with a spice (+ sugar) intervention. The butter chicken was perfect. But the palak paneer was amazing—even I think so. It was nothing like the paneer I get in restaurants, there were big chunks of tomato in it. Jaffrey's recipe is very hot, so next time I will reduce the jalapeño, but it was fabulous. The rice is basmati, with cinnamon, a lot of cardamom, cumin, star anise, and lots of saffron and orange rind. I love it too.

"HoMe," "Cap Café" and "Mockingbird" with Beth's book.

Above is a photo of  heaven—three scripts in the works. And that green book is friend Beth's faboo memoir of her crush on Beatle Paul and her excruciating year in Paris as a young girl. It is a great read. Her blog is here if you want to reach her to get a book.

Bliss is finishing the first draft of your screenplay on Friday and getting an email on Saturday from the artistic director of the theatre producing your play with notes about your script. I took the weekend off, but yesterday I loved diving back into my play to address the AD's awesome notes.

This is new, writing creatively and writing dialogue. It is a form of writing to which I aspired but felt incapable of producing. So to have Warren and Kim keen for my new love is really thrilling.

Every day I walk for usually three hours. My pattern: Up very early and writing by 5:00 am. Writing undisturbed to anywhere between noon (if I have a lunch date) and 2:00. Then a big walk, then rest, dinner and maybe some review of the morning's work.

When I am writing, the walks fly by because my mind is fully engaged with ideas or conundrums in the writing. Were it not for the walking, the writing would be far, far less successful in its structure. When I sit at my desk, I work on the details; when I walk, I am thinking about the bigger — the arc of the story. So a pen and paper is always in my backpack.

Cheers.

The Crash

It was inevitable… the crash. After all that manic writing, yesterday came the "snap." Caught between the pressure of wanting renovations done by a contractor who is now a month late starting and my (minor) lung surgery on June 12.  I had to "fire" him and that was the trigger.

But, relentless optimist that I am, I appreciate the gentle ride of my obsessions and mania because at my age I can be conscious of it all and that consciousness makes me a better writer as I move more and more into dialogue and drama and away from technical writing.

I had a ball early yesterday morning at Whole Foods. "Monica" was training "Dixie' (now there's a name you don't hear often now a days) and there was hardly anyone in the store so while they were processing I asked them what they thought about while they worked.

"Do you ever say to yourself: 'Wow, no wonder that guy's so fat. Look at what he eats?" Or: "Good God, woman, you only need one of those!" I wondered because their job is to serve a constant stream of people and they get to meet each person through their food choices—a Rorschach snapshot of their personality. We had a lot of fun talking about it and it would never have occurred to me to ask had I not started writing drama and dialogue. I love it.

It's an adage: Write what you know. And great writers are avid readers. I was never a great reader. I mean I love reading and getting lost in the worlds of great writers, but I was a writer. I thought of reading as the passive form of writing and I preferred active involvement with words. And I have always been a talker, so it should not surprise me that my writing of dialogue is going pretty well.

The crash was short and deep. A least self-loathing keeps you humble—again, the optimist sees good in everything. I wanted the ear of God; I wanted to negotiate and make promises. Today is a better day.

Party! Party! Party!

22,000 words and 90 pages and two brilliant scenes (even if I do say so myself) and 81 other scenes, many quite decent, I think, for a first-timer. I have finished my first draft of my first screenplay. It is called Mockingbird and I am even happy with the title. So that's one play (accepted for production at Presentation House) and one screenplay in one month. Not bad for an old fart.

But way more important than that, is the miracle of Samuel Smith. Oh my.

Leon: Master of his domain.

Spring cleaning.

Sam Smith is my New Boyfriend

I feel like I'm a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush on a man that is burning my sheets and pillow at night. I have listened to this song so many times today and I fell for him on first hearing. I am writing my butt off and for a break and for inspiration, nothing beats Mr. Smith. Oh my God. He has the softest, tenderest song to a man whom he knows will tell him "I love you but not in that way." He sings another song, this time, to a woman that says plaintively in its chorus: "… leave you lover, leave him for me."

I have Beatlemania for this handsome, gentle (gay) man.

Totem

Oh my God, that show was good. Robert LePage and Cirque du Soleil. The "fixed trapeze" man was the handsomest, strongest, sexiest man I have ever seen. The consumes, the acts, the comedy, the WOMEN on unicycles—oh my God! What a night! What a show! What a price!

It's going to take me a while to get over him.

The costumes were amazing.

I was in the third row.

Flaming Again

I day, 10,000 words, 35 pages and 22 scenes. That's my progress report on Screenplay, the title less adaptation of my play, Knock Knock, I'm doing with Warren. I sent him the 10,000 words without reading them just to get an idea of how I'm doing as a communicator of moving imagery. For a complete novice, I think I am doing acceptably, thanks largely to the education I got from watching Les garçons, et Guillaume à Table! and from talking with Warren.

June 4th. I'm in The Flame again. My sixth time, telling the story of being a noviciate teacher taking students on a hike up the mountain, when tragedy strikes. It's free. Come on by.

Wet, Wet Friday

It's pouring outside, and dark. And the prognosticators don't have good news for the upcoming week. I will get lots done because its also pouring figuratively:

1. Early yesterday morning, Warren arrived and we got down to turning Knock Knock into a screenplay. It was slow going. Poor Warren is having to start from scratch. The whole morning was spent teaching me how to write for film. Then Warren left and I wrote five short bits to send to him to read like homework.
   
   Guess what? I really like it. It is like no other writing I have ever done because it requires a lot of description and for a guy with a very visual way of thinking, I not only find it rather easy, I really like it. All my life was technical writing — all actions or ideas — but for this screenplay, Warren has me describing the people and places in it and I love it.
2. My voice situation is so strange. I don't know if it is better or not, but I can talk without any problems at all 99% of the time. But, if I want, I can also lose it. I am of the impression that I have learned to talk in a new "place" on my vocal chords. That is how I think of my intuition because I can go "back" to the old place I used to talk and speak in the horrid way I have for the past 3 months.
3. Kim, on our future with my new play, HoMe: "I am very stoked about this idea. I sense it will be rewarding artistically, personally and financially for both you and the theatre." He has written to say that we will do a workshop in the fall.
   
   Doing my first play, Knock Knock, was hugely rewarding. The laughter, the curtain calls, the notes and emails all were very satisfying, but self-production short-circuits complete satisfaction—and I knew it would. That's why Kim's initiation of—and enthusiasm for—HoMe feels so satisfying. I have reached my ultimate and dream goal in life and I had let it go.
   
   I want to say that again: I have reached my ultimate and dream goal in life and I had let it go.
   
   The dream I dared not dream all my life was to write a play that got professionally produced. Bonus: I am the lead performer. And I had let that dream go. Four years ago, I thought to myself: Why carry this disappointment around? Why not let go of that dream and get on with life — find happiness in new goals? And that is what I did. That's how the idea of self-producing Knock Knock. I was buying the dream.
   
   But Kim has rewarded that initiative and fulfilled a the life-long dream born when I first saw the garage of our new home in August 1952. It became my first theatre. It's time again for my new catch-phrase: Fucking pinch me.
4. June 12th is the day of my operation. Dr. Leung calls it the mother of biopsies because it is not a diagnostic biopsy, it is a therapeutic and research biopsy. They take out a piece go lung to support treatment research for me and a much bigger piece to support clinical research because they think many people with HIV and on the cocktail may develop this disease.