Oh, hi friends!
So I’ve got this idea for a one-woman play. It’s a little, um, offbeat, and a little dark, but something about it tells me I can’t not do it, right? I’m going to work on it, and revise it, and get some friends over to workshop it with me, too. I’m going to submit it to a festival, and it’s going to get in, and I’m going to workshop it some more. I’ll perform it, and people will say they enjoyed it — although The Guardian will only give it three out of five stars. There are other ideas simmering, too, but I decide to see this one through. I meet someone in TV who tells me, “You ever think of this as a series?” I hadn’t, and then I did, and I write that, too. People say they enjoy it. Eventually I’ll get an even wider audience, and I’ll keep writing and working because that’s how this all started, right? One idea for a play? And then just a little while later, I’ll be at an awards show and become the first woman since Tina Fey to win gold statues for best actress in a comedy and best writing in a comedy series, and my series that all sprang from one idea that I decided to see through will take home five awards total, and the New York Times will say that I “owned the Emmys.”
And that’s a lesson of how much can happen in five years.
Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash
“You never know when you will be found out if your work is careless. A year or so ago, on the cover of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine, I saw a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It was a picture taken from a helicopter and it showed the top of the statue’s head. I was amazed at the detail there. The sculptor had done a painstaking job with the lady’s coiffure, and yet he must have been pretty sure that the only eyes that would ever see this detail would be the uncritical eyes of sea gulls. He couldn’t have dreamt that any man would ever fly over this head and take a picture of it. He was artist enough, however, to finish off this part of the statue with as much care as he had devoted to her face and her arms and the torch and everything that people can see as they sail up the bay. He is right. When you are creating a work of art, or any other kind of work, finish the job off perfectly. You never know when a helicopter, or some other instrument not at the moment invented, may come along and find you out.”
From Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (first published in 1949)
And finally, here is Humphrey the bat eating a banana. (h/t Dingo)
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara