Sheila UnPlugged (Sort Of)

I arrived at the motel Friday afternoon. The morning had been beautiful, a perfect June day. By the time I got to the beach, heavy clouds had rolled in, the wind had picked up alarmingly, and it was freezing. Not just chilly, but freezing. The boom of the crashing breakers filled the air. I got out of my car and struggled with my door against the wind. I was in heaven. I don’t go away for a weekend at the beach to enjoy the SUN. I HOPE for a storm, I hope for greys and fogs and rain. It is my favorite kind of beach weather. The proprietor of the hotel, who looked like he had strolled out of a Hemingway short story, was apologetic about the weather. He told me this while chewing on a cigar, wearing a battered bathrobe. I tried to tell him that I love this kind of weather but he was not processing my words at all. It was as though I had said nothing. So I gave up. “Yup, the weather sucks, oh well, you’re right.” I was the only person staying at the motel, which brought about distinct horror-movie vibes, and it was also under construction, so I would glance out my door and see five guys strolling by holding 2 by 4s and chain saws. It was alarming. But also awesome. I am extremely productive when I put my mind to it, like crazy productive, so I felt it would be okay to go explore before I got down to work. I walked across the road to the beach and gaped at the giant rollers crashing, one after the other after the other. The dunes were bent to the side in the wind. Everything looked extremely dramatic. I walked down the empty boardwalk to the little “town” in search of some food to bring back to my motel room. I bought some extremely expensive sushi and headed back, surrounded by a roaring wind and the approaching dusk. It was fantastic.

My motel room had a fully working kitchen and hard wood floors. I took a shower. I had some sushi. I watched Wild in the Country on my laptop and took notes. I had a blast. Thunder and lightning boomed and flashed and every time I looked outside it was a wilderness of rain and wind. I went to bed at 9:30.

I wanted to see the sunrise so I set my alarm. I peeked out my window and it was still grey and dark. If the sun had risen, I sure couldn’t see it. I bundled up, grabbed my cup of cold coffee, and went down to the beach to commune with the waves and the sand. It is my favorite thing to do. The waves were still relentless, and the wind was so high that it whipped the foam off the tops, giving the waves long horses’ manes, like T.S. Eliot said. The sky was overcast. Huge vehicles drove on the beach, combing the sand. There was a beach club down the way with palm trees planted, giving a feeling of Santa Monica. I walked down the boardwalk again, glorying in the desertion, the sand that had blown up onto the boardwalk, the feeling of emptiness and isolation. This is my landscape. I found a little coffee shop open and had an egg sandwich. It was me and the geriatric crew. I headed back to the my motel room. It was only 8 a.m. I grabbed my notebook, sat on a bench on the boardwalk, and started to write. I wrote for two hours, long-hand. I didn’t worry about editing, I didn’t worry about structure. Not yet. I just wrote. Get this all out and put it together later. By that point, the sun had come out for real. The light was just amazing, because out to sea it was all grey and heavy, and back on land it was clear. The sun blasted up against the boardwalk and the buildings, blazing the lifeguard chairs and everything else into bright white. It was startling.

I wanted some groceries, so I drove to a Shop Rite, and bought some supplies. I came back. I went down and sat on the beach for a couple of hours. It was a beautiful day suddenly. I saw some Jersey Shore elements, girls in leopard skin bikinis taking pictures of each other and immediately uploading to Facebook. The water was really too rough to swim in. I waded. I ate a peach. I wrote. It then got too hot, and I’m too nervous about being in the sun for long periods of time, so I went back and hung out in my motel room for a couple of hours. All the while, my mind percolating, working over my writing, thinking, contemplating. Taking notes. I watched the reality show with Bethenny Frankel and was surprised at how much I fell in love with her. I have never seen the show and am only vaguely aware of her, but I kind of love her to death. I so rarely watch television that I was struck by the commercials and how stupid they are. It was like I was Mowgli being confronted with modern civilization. One commercial for Tum’s starts off with: “Sick of pizza breath and pizza heartburn?” Clearly the next statement was going to be, “You need Tum’s”, but I spoke out loud to the television: “How ’bout you stop eating pizza, you dumbass?” It’s a good thing I don’t watch more television.

The motel is so close to the beach that it made everything easy. If I got sick of my room, I could be on the beach in 30 seconds. If I got sick of the beach, I could be back in my room instantly.

I went to bed again at 9:30 p.m. Woke up again to see the sunrise, and this time Mother Nature was showing off. No more overcast skies, the dawn was lavender and pink, the ocean was dark and silvery blue, touched with magenta – it was crazy beautiful. I drove to a Dunkin Donuts I had seen nearby, got a coffee, came back, grabbed my towel and a peach and my notebook and went down onto the beach. It was 6:30 in the morning. It was just me, a couple surfers and one dude fishing. I would get up and go down to the shore, wading around, loving the feeling of the cold waves. Then I would go back to my little area, and write more.

It’s good for me to force myself to write long-hand. It changes the experience of writing. I am so used to writing on the computer, and it’s good, it’s awesome, I type fast. But writing long-hand actually seems to slow the brain down. It’s more contemplative, it’s more leisurely. I still ended up writing 20 pages over the entire weekend. Now I need to go back and edit, and the computer will be great for that. I may experiment more with this. Writing long-hand, editing on the computer.

Alongside the project I went away to work on, I have my New York script reading to plan for. It’s already been re-scheduled twice (well, three or four times, if you count the fact that we were going to do it back in December but the schedule didn’t work out). But we are zooming in on a date now. My cousin Kerry (who will be playing the lead female role) has been tireless in helping to make this happen. You need people in your corner. A playwright cannot do it alone. I could set up my own reading again, like I did the first time – but I knew, after Los Angeles and Chicago – that I needed to push it to the next level. I needed to involve people not just in my own circle. I needed to widen the net. Kerry has helped me do that. And, to be fair, I have helped me do that too. Our ideas for the male actor have roamed far and wide. We had someone attached to it for a couple of months, but his schedule is totally daunting – he’s a busy guy, a star, and it just ended up not working out. We then brainstormed about who else could do it. I reached out to a guy I had interviewed during Tribeca, and he was totally awesome and open to it, but his schedule, too, was way too busy. Things are happening for this guy, as we speak, and the month of June was just bad for him. But he did consider it, and I am grateful to him for that. Once he fell through, I reached out to Brooke, my casting director friend, and she supplied me with some names (she is familiar with the script and what the lead guy should be like), and Kerry had a couple of ideas. One guy we were interested in is currently on a national tour, so he was out. Then I thought of this other guy – I had seen him in a movie, had loved his performance, I wrote about it, and wrote about him specifically. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him before, but he suddenly came to me. You know what? He would be perfect. I wonder if he’s … available? If he would be into it? So I tracked him down. He read the script. We spoke on the phone. Not only was he available but he was excited about it, and, judging from his comments, TOTALLY clicked with the script. (You never know. We had an experience with an actor in Chicago we were going to cast who read the script and had a lukewarm response to it. And not just lukewarm, he didn’t “get it”. That’s fine – not everyone is going to like what you do – but I certainly didn’t want to spend our brief rehearsal time trying to convince this guy that what I had written was worthwhile. There wasn’t enough time for that. Better to find someone who was gung-ho, ready to go, and “got it”.) So within 30 seconds of talking to this guy I knew: Wow, he gets it, he understands it, he had a visceral response to it. Yes yes yes. And, best of all, he’s available. This is the problem with trying to work with successful actors. NOBODY IS AVAILABLE. This is a GOOD thing. But it makes it hard to get everyone in the same room at the same time. This actor is also busy – but he happens to have nothing going on in June, and his schedule was flexible. OMG, I love him. Hahaha. I get so worked up.

So we’re still waiting to get a date nailed down. The theatre we are doing it in is going to get back to us today. Fingers crossed. So all through my weekend of Elvis and writing and storms on the beach, I was emailing with Kerry about our plans. I am thrilled she’s on board, I am thrilled, and we are close close close to nailing this thing down. Every second of every day is like a giant PRAYER that everything comes together. It’s a nail-biter, for sure.

It’s fun to have two huge projects going on at the same time. It’s stressful, because I always feel “behind”, but it’s really good, too. And they are such diverse projects. It just worked out that way.

I checked out of the motel at around 9 a.m. and shrieked back up the Garden State Parkway, blasting Elvis, and happy at my productive weekend. You never know how things will work out. I clearly don’t suffer from writer’s block, but I do sometimes procrastinate when I have something I NEED to work on. I’m rebellious, I guess. It’s stupid. I knew going in: Sheila, if you go away for two days and two nights and you don’t work at all on this project, you are going to be so bummed out at yourself. Don’t waste this time. I didn’t.

It’s also awesome that the work on the script is done, as far as I’m concerned. The major restructuring and major edits happened during the workshop in LA. I did some tweaks in Chicago, but they were minor. As far as I’m concerned, the script is ready to go. Of course, things will come up in rehearsal, as we get closer, and I am open to making edits – but not before that. If I start tweaking now, before we even get into it, I will ruin it. It’s happened before. So at least that is not on my plate right now. I can wait on that. I have a month to “get my shit together” with this other project, and it’s happening. I am gathering my strength. Exciting times coming.