Story 143: Day of Days

            “I’m so tired and I want to give up,” she said to her co-worker during a brief pause in their assembly line – the gears had gotten stuck again.

            “Give up on what?”  He asked.

            “My life!  I mean, what’s the point of all this?  I literally do the same exact thing, minute by minute, hour by hour, all day long, up until the moment the whistle blows and I get to go to the diner and serve grumpy customers all night long!  That’s it for me, practically every day!  No rest, no advancement, no savings, no extra space in my apartment to maybe squeeze in a chair, no car to drive myself anywhere, no food that’s actually good for me, and no health insurance to help with my rising blood pressure and possible cancer!  Why bother making a living when it’s the thing that’s killing me?!”

            “That sure sounds pretty bleak when you put it like that.”

            “Yeah, well I’m done!  I’m done working myself straight into my grave just to make money for everybody else – I want my day!”

            “Which one, Saturday?”

            “No, you fool, my day!  The one day where I can do whatever I want, when I want it, money’s no object, time and distance mean nothing, the works!  I want the freedom of being a kid again with the economic and legal mobility of an adult!”

            He thought about this.  “Sure, OK.”

            “OK what?”

            “You can have your day.”

            “Yeah all right, says who, my personal genie?”

            “I guess you can call me that.”

            “…What?”

            “You know, you’ve never asked me for anything before.”

            “You never told me that I’ve been working next to a real live genie for the past seven years!”

            “Guess it never came up.  That one’s on me, then.”

            She sputtered a bit then said, “All right, I want to start off with at least $150 billion – ”

            “I also forgot to mention that you only get the one wish.”

            “That’s not fair!”

            “It is what it is, you want it or not?”

            “Yes, I want it!  Please.”

          “All right: you get one day to do whatever you want, kid freedom with adult mobility, no monetary or temporal limits.  Want to go to Vegas?”

            “No, everyone goes to Vegas, that’s boring!”

            “Suit yourself.”

            She woke up, extremely relaxed, in a luxurious hotel room – when she opened the curtains, the sun was rising over a warm tropical ocean.

            “Sighhhhhhhhh…..”  She basked in that glow for half an hour.

         After lounging over a satisfactory and heart-healthy breakfast on the beach, she flew a time-suspending plane to her favorite amusement park that she would visit often when she was a kid: there were no lines, so she was able to ride all the rides before 10:00 a.m.  She then took several other time-suspending flights for a quick cruise down the Nile, popped in for lunch at a Parisian café, rode a slide off of the Great Wall of China, and checked in on the penguins in Antarctica to see how they were doing.  She made her way back to her hometown in the USA to take in a mindless blockbuster at the local cinema (restored to its former glory), then paused to fall on her knees, raise her arms in the air, and scream “Arrrrrggggghhhhh!!!” at the setting sun before she hiked the Alps and had a sumptuous dinner at a Peruvian restaurant actually in Peru.  She spent the day’s final’s hours in the North Pole watching the Aurora Borealis shimmer across the infinite stars in the cosmos, then lay down next to Santa’s Workshop to make one last snow angel before closing her eyes to drift off to sleep.

            Her eyes snapped open instead and she hopped a time-suspending plane at 11:59 p.m. in her current time zone: why should her day ever end if all she had to return to was suffering and futility?  She rode that plane to infinity, constantly crossing the International Date Line to the previous day and ensuring that her day never ended as her adventures continued onward.

            Her co-worker shook his head to himself as he resumed his work on the assembly line: “It’s so rare that they find a loophole – she's earned it.”

Story 142: From Stage to Screen

            “Thank you so much for meeting with me today,” the film producer said as he shook the hand of the writer of the music, lyrics, and book of the current smash hit play.  “Please, have a seat.”  He sat behind his desk as she sat across from him and next to her agent, who was trying not to grin from ear to ear with the knowledge of the major deal that he had landed.

            “Thank you for having me,” the writer said; she really did not know what the etiquette was in high-powered meetings such as these and was winging it.

            “Now,” the producer said, “you know this was inevitable: Struggling Lives, huge Broadway success, all the Tonys, constantly sold out with over-priced tickets, running for years, soundtrack went platinum, the works.  So of course Hollywood wants to turn it into a film.  Musicals are in vogue again, movie audiences are eating them up, and you’ll have the added bonus of a new soundtrack with the film cast that generates even more royalties.  You can only come out a winner in all this.”

            “So I gather.  It’s all very exciting.”

            “You bet it is.  Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, film is a different medium from the stage, so with the screenplay there are going to have to be a few… revisions.  You know, to make everything flow better on screen.”

            “I realized that that probably would happen, yes.”

            “Good, so right off the bat, you know we’re going to have to cut three songs.”

            “What?!”

            “The play’s run time is three hours and 15 minutes, which doesn’t include the intermission – no movie audience is going to sit through that, even if there were space battles every other scene.”

            “Why wouldn’t they?  It’d probably be the same people in the audience.”

            “Trust me on this: the average moviegoer is a mouth-breathing voyeur with the attention span of inert clay.  Studies have proven this, which is why we make the movies we do.”

            “Then how can they be the same people who are eating up musicals?”

          “That is what science calls a phenomenon.  Going back to the cuts: the songs that can be disposed of the easiest are ‘Another Soliloquy,’ ‘Reflections: Part 2,’ and ‘Running in Place Yet Again,’ due to the fact that they are absolute deadweight.”

            “Deadweight!  They are pivotal insights into the characters’ transformations!”

            “Not to be insensitive, but they are boring.  You put them up on screen, I can just hear the test audience yawning and twitching on the first one, shouting ‘Enough already!’ by the time the second one rolls around, and the third one would just kill whatever momentum was left and the entire theater would be empty.”

            “Boor!”

            “He has a point,” her agent chimed in.  “These only work on stage because the lead needs to change costumes and the audience needs a break from seeing her all the time.”

            “Silence, traitor!”

            “There’s another revision I want to talk to you about,” the producer cut in.  “I know the play is set in Italy, but since we want names in this we’re moving the action to Little Italy.”

            “Whaaaat?!”

            “Yeah, you know, star power and all that, plus budget cuts keeping us from a lot of location shooting.  Also, Chad got his passport revoked and he can’t leave the country for at least a decade.  Or is it for life?”

            “Chad who?”

            The agent chimed in again: “Oh, they got Chad Astro to play Enzo.  I love that guy, he can do anything!”

            “Chad… Astro,” the writer said through gritted teeth.  “To play Enzo!”

            “Yeah, isn’t that great?”  Her agent beamed.

            “He can’t sing!”

            “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that,” the producer waved her off.  “It’s really not that hard.”

           “I have an entire stage cast who would disagree!  And what about the lead, Fiorenza?  I’m assuming you’re not going with any of the women who’ve played her so far?”

            “Nah, they’re too old.  We’re getting Holli Chipmunk.”

            “Aaaaaaahhhhh!!!!”

            “Oh, her voice isn’t too bad,” her agent said.  “My kids watch her TV show all the time.”

            “She’s off-key even with computer-generated enhancement!”

           “Yeah, but she’s perfect for the part,” the producer said.  “The kids love her, so there’s our 12-17 and 18-34 demographics.”

            “The character is 53 years old!”

            “…Says you.”

            “Says the entire plot!  That’s the whole point of Struggling Lives!  She’s old enough to have lived!”

           “Yeah, that brings us to another change: instead of the failing business that she’s trying to keep afloat with her friends and her children, the movie’s going to show her getting ready for college and trying to find a boyfriend.”

            The writer began banging her head on the desk.

           “Now, now,” her agent tried to calm her, “think of the whole new audience who’ll be able to see your work now at much cheaper prices!”

         She stood in despair.  “But it isn’t my work anymore!  It’s been corrupted – tainted – destroyed!”

            “Hardly,” the producer said, unfazed.  “This is standard operating procedure when it comes to movie musicals.”

            “I obviously can’t stop you from going forward with this monstrosity,” the writer said as she exited stage left, “but know this: I refuse to have my name on any promotional material, and whatever royalties are due to me still better end up in my checking account!”

            “That’s your prerogative,” the producer shrugged as he began to make a random phone call to show that he, in fact, was the one who was ending the meeting.  The writer swept out the door as her agent ran after her to make sure that he was not fired.

            One year later, Struggling Co-Eds debuted in and departed from movie theaters within a week.  The writer continued to benefit from goodwill generated by the beloved Broadway show and simultaneously workshopped her next piece, Trials in Selloutsville.