Jared AxelrodWriter of Adventure

R and I have signed up for The 24 Hour Cram, a brilliant idea put on by Plays & Players–who I have done work with before, and indeed, hope to do work with again. Unsurprisingly, the mad minds who gave us “Superheroes Who Are Super” have yet another deliciously quick and dirty theater concept up their collective sleeves.  Here’s how they describe it:

We meet on January 29th at 8pm at Plays & Players 3rd Floor. Everyone is put into teams that each consist of one writer, one director and an equal number of actors.

We chat, we laugh and then we send the writers home to write a 10 minute play by 8am the next morning. Directors receive the hot off the printer plays at 8:01am and meet up with their actors to rehearse until house opens at 8pm on January 30th. For those of you still counting - that is 24 hours of pure cram!

Clearly, I am insane for wanting to try this. Luckily, my wife is too. We are enablers in our insanity.

JR and I have an edge on this, as we have seen the results of a previous 24 Hour Cram and have a pretty good idea of what works (outsized characters, mysteries) and what doesn’t (quiet character, slow builds). We did a practice run last night, to see how long it took us to write a ten-minute scene. Mine, a Mamet-ian exploration of the pros and cons of the iPad, took about an hour. JR’s, an examination of the pitfall of modern supernatural romance via speed dating, took about the same time, but was, as you might imagine, a little more deep.  After that rush job, 12 hours aught to be a luxury.

So, yes, it will be insane. But, the exact type of insanity that we excell at. Which means it will be awesome.

I expect to see you all there.

s part of some half-thought out response to JR’s latest work of astounding fiction, an internet person of dubious merit asked if “Sex In The City”-which JR compares this piece to-was, in fact, “the show about three whores and their mom.” This is apparently a joke from “Family Guy,” but I’m having trouble parsing the humor portion. I guess there’s a show about three prostitutes and their mother? And the title is similar, so it’s like a pun? Google says no…

In any case, this naturally led us to consider what a television show about three whores and their mom would be like. Depressing, obviously. Even if it achieved “The Wire”-like arias of connection and insight, it would still be about three sisters driven to sell the bodies, and a mother who stood idly by or who acts as some sort of hellish harridan of a madam. Not exactly something I would choose while channel-surfing.

But, what if we change the phrasing a bit? What if it was about three sex-workers and their mom? Now we’re cooking with steam!

What if a pioneering transgendered pornographer, (played by none other than pioneering transgendered pornographer Buck Angel, natch) took in his kid sister who just graduated from college and wanted to be a dominatrix. And then their other sister moves in, after a messy divorce, and decides to devote her life to her real passion, writing erotica. Add to this a cantankerous-yet-wise matriarch who needs a place to convalesce after recent surgery, and you’ve got sit-com gold! It practically writes itself.

Man, I would so watch that. And buy the DVD. And hold theme parties.

‘m pretty good. My broken ankle is healed and I can almost walk like a normal person. I’ve got a graphic novel with a great deal of promise, finally making headway on my novel WAY OF THE DODO, and am frustrated at my dayjob.

But those are outside things, aren’t they? Atmospheric disturbances.  How is Planet Jared doing, I believe the question was. Nevermind the asteroids.

Pretty good.

One thing the Ankle Incident drove home is how my tendency to rush to the end keeps me back. Dealing with the broken bones, and then the subsequent healing (still ongoing!) forced me to slow down and contemplate what I was doing. I tend to get very Zen in moments of crisis, judging what behavior is most effective from an almost detached perspective–you can ask the paramedics; I had ‘em laughing all the way to the hospital–and this injury kept me in that state for longer than usual. And what I’ve come away with, is it’s better to do things than to do plan what you’re going to do with them.

Don’t count your chickens, in other words.  But in a creative way. Don’t name you chickens, maybe? Don’t make your posters for your dancing chicken show, until they’ve hatched and it’s clear that dancing is their true calling? You get the idea.

This is been hard for me, because it’s my nature to skip to the end. But that’s alot of pressure to put on oneself, and it’s easy to put the work aside if it becomes clear that it’s not going to end up where you wanted it to in your head. I’ve done that too much. It’s hard to stop that, to scale back into the smaller frame. But it’s the right thing to do.  ‘Cuase if a project works, then I can build on it. And if it doesn’t, well, it was just a small idea to begin with.

That’s an email I sent in July, which means I learned the Lesson of 2009 early.  2009 has been my nonline year, full of projects and events that weren’t designed for virtual spaces. It was a year of food and sculpture, of theater and photography, and of secrets. Especially secrets. A great many things happened in 2009, but most of them never reached this space. Nonline year.

Just as 2008 will always be defined by my wedding, 2009 will always be the year I broke my ankle. It will be the year JR was able to sleep in the hospital bed with me because nurse saw her as my wife. It will be the year I re-learned how to walk, the year I struggled with what the truly handicapped go through every day, the year everything slowed down to crawl.  The year I learned what it takes to break bones and what it takes to rebuild muscles.

A year of learning, as the Lesson of 2009 above can attest.

y favorite expression concerning the New Year has always been “That much still a child, I still consider the start of the year to be at the fall.” Back to school, and all. If 2009 has any distinction, it’s that the end of summer didn’t feel like the end of the year at all. And that  this casual, academic shuffling from one winter day to another felt like the end of something old and the start of something new. We’re starting over, the lot of us. Setting it all back to zero for one more go.

Though the years barely more than a week old, there’s been more than enough sadness to go around. Two recent deaths have hit pretty hard, and that’s just the tip of the melancholy iceberg that extends far out into our friends and loved ones. It been hard to look at the new year with hopeful faces.

But.

On January 1st, I was told by a friend I had known for a handful of months that it was like we had known each other all out lives. Last night, I had a dinner of Iron Chef quality with a friend I had not seen in ages, and met a friend I hope to know for ages yet. This morning, I juggled snowballs, something that had never, strangely,  occurred to me before.

Let this be 2010, then. A year of the old ways made new, and the new ways made old.

Also, let it be full of Jessica Hische’s delightful letters from Daily Drop Cap.

They called her Resolve.  A woman of immense strength and power, she stood toe to toe with the Mega-Gorgon of the Lost Dimension, the Storm Kings of 67th Century, and the Xenophage Legion.  When the Galactivore came to lower its might teeth into our very planet, Resolve and Resolve alone stood fast in the face of such certain doom.  She was indomitable, indestructible, and possessed a bravery unlike any other the world had seen.

So it was that when the Cosmic Challenger came to Earth and bellowed for a champion, Resolve stood, and met his wager. With the fate of the world in the balance, Resolve met the Cosmic Challenger on equal footing. His muscular frame towered over her, despite her own impressive stature.

“Well, little one!” He said. “As the challenged, it is up to you choose the style of battle! Be wary! I am a master of over four thousand distinct martial arts, and over twenty nine thousand variations of them! Do not expect to catch me unawares!”

“You will not need any of them,” Resolve said. “All you must do is meet my eyes.”

Born Of An Atom Bomb is a daily warm-up piece, where I base a character around a random word or phrase. Today’s word: resolve