Every Year

That's right, it's here again - Ernest Shackleton's birthday!  (I don't know who that is, but Google thinks it's important, so... Oh, and it's ES's big day HERE, but it might not be back in the States yet. Just FYI.)

In honor of the big day, I decided to combine work and relaxation - I watched Valentine's Day (no reason) and charted the storylines in order to analyze them and break down the structure.  You sure catch a lot more of the details on a second viewing! Gary Marshall must have had all kinds of spreadsheets (possibly Gant Charts) in order to keep track of all those characters. I can only imagine what got left on the cutting room floor! (Well, if anything.  There is a LOT going on in this movie.)

Also, just for fun, I'm including here a piece I wrote in a workshop this morning. Any resemblance of person (or date) is purely coincidental. (The title was random, came from someone else. It's really not anywhere near finished. Like I said, it's just here for fun. Coincidentally.)

Doorbell Doesn’t Work, Enter Around the Back

 Doris had always hated Valentine’s Day. Ever since she could remember, pink-and-red had given her a migraine, and pictures of chubby cupids made her instinctively reach for her taser. Last year’s work party, with the 4 Aortas Barbershop Quartet, didn’t go so well – and February was a lousy time to be looking for a job. Doris would know.

She had seasonal allergies – they always flared up around floral shops the weeks before and after February 14. Chocolate gave her hives – but only once a year. Coming within 20 yards of a Hallmark store brought on a rash, and commercialization being what it was she had to avoid them for nearly two-thirds of the year.

Doris was not anti-love or anti-sex or anti-romance or anti-anything, really – she’d tried every known cure. Dating sites, a singles’ cruise, immersion therapy… that last had driven the dog crazy (poor thing could handle only so much Michael Buble, Barry White, and Andrea Boccelli – it was more of a Nirvana kind of terrier). She even went to work as a holiday temp at Niagara Falls one year.  It was no use, though – the doctor’s bills and restraining orders just kept piling up.  And, Doris admitted to herself, she really SHOULD have taken her husband along on that cruise. That had been a bad Valentine’s Day for everybody.

Doris had had enough.

This year, she had a plan – she would sneak up on her own neurosis and clobber it into submission (with two dozen roses – long-stemmed, naturally).

TBC (someday, maybe...)

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Enjoy Ernest Shackleton's birthday!  (Research time! Woo!)