Snapshots

— So I’ve got a big Super Bowl bash to go to tomorrow. Lots of fun. We’re all Patriots fans.

— I FINISHED UNDERWORLD THIS MORNING. I DID IT. I started that novel in … NOVEMBER? I have no idea. Let’s just say: WAY TOO LONG AGO. And yes. The ending is quite moving, well-written, and actually kind of redemptive. However, I have this to say: The book does not add up. It just doesn’t. The promise of the beginning is somehow diffused in the way over-written prose in the middle. I lost the plot. Oh well. But still. I was DETERMINED to finish it, and I did. Now. Onto another book.

— I saw my sister Siobhan in a Eugene O’Neill festival last night. It was a festival of scenes from his plays, and she was in Touch of the Poet. A very very sad piece of writing. Siobhan was lovely, she had a soft brogue that sounded totally real … and she had one moment when her husband says something cruel to her, and she flinched, her eyes filling with tears … but then in the next second, she recovered, put on a brave smile. Lovely work.

— It is spring here, all of a sudden. Balmy. Warm, soft air, warm wind. The snow melting. What?? Three days ago it was frigid. Schizo.

— I watched some of Kate & Leopold early this morning. Just because it makes me feel good. I love that stupid sappy movie. I really do.

— Off-line writing continuing on. I am hard at work. A busy bee.

— Speaking of Eugene O’Neill, I am now going to be a “play-reader” for the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in Connecticut. What this means is: playwrights from all over submit new pieces of work to the O’Neill, in the hopes that the theatre will choose to do a production of it. The theatre is so well-renowned that they must get hundreds (if not thousands) of these submissions a year. A daunting task to read them all. So they need people to read the scripts for them, people who are, of course, qualified on SOME level to give educated feedback on whether or not these are good plays, what works, what doesn’t work – and I start this week. 5 new plays are now shrieking towards my mailbox. I’m very excited to get to work.

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7 Responses to Snapshots

  1. Just1Beth says:

    Hi Sheila- I love Kate and Leopold, too. I think it is really cool how he goes back in time, but I don’t think I could ever jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. My two favorite parts are when Leopold makes her that big romantic evening and when they go to his old house and he undoes the wall-shelf thing, and I wish I could do that somewhere in my house. I also like how he saves her-it is very heroic. There are so many things I love about that movie. I’ll see you Friday,Love, Ceileidh

  2. Ann Marie says:

    Man, I’m glad to hear that there are other people who love this movie. It’s up there on my list of “Guilty Pleasure” movies… ones I can see over and over. Clueless is another. Overboard, of course. Blast from the Past.

    Congrats on the “play reader” gig, Sheila… sounds like a cool opportunity.

  3. Colin MacDougall says:

    ” 5 new plays are now shrieking towards my mailbox. I’m very excited to get to work.”
    Don’t be too sure. When I was out of work for a couple of weeks, a friend offered me a chance to pick up a few bucks reading scripts for a playwriting contest. I read five plays, three of which were some kind of reworking of Oedipus (‘cuz God knows noone’s ever done THAT before), including one that set the story in a department store shoe department, and gave it a happy ending.
    It was the hardest and ugliest fifty bucks I ever earned.

  4. red says:

    Colin – wow. Thanks! Now that you, a total stranger, have shared your bad experience, I am TOTALLY going to go into MY experience with low low low expectations. No sense getting all excited, right? Why bother? Don’t assume it’ll be fun … assume it’ll be a drag. That way I’ll never be disappointed!

    Thanks so much!

  5. red says:

    Kate & Leopold is SUCH a guilty pleasure. I adore it. I love the scene when he gets ENRAGED at how you always need to push the toast down twice in order to get the bread properly toasted. It send him into a RAGE.

  6. mjf says:

    I saw Kate and Leopold in the movie theater with Dratch the day before we went to St. John. I had no desire to see it…Meg Ryan…not my fave..but Hugh had recntly hosted SNL and was kind and generous and gentlemanly (beyondd the call of duty) to Dratch …so we love him…i’ll see anything he does because of how kind he was to her.

  7. red says:

    MJF:

    He seems like he’d be that type, frankly. I think his acting is lovely in that movie.

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