Welcome to January and 2021. Take a minute, breathe in the fresh air and shake the dust of 2020 off your boots. I always love the start of a new year. I love looking at the calendar, it’s pages all fresh and blank with no scrawled notes and sprouting post-it notes decorating the edges like a ruffled skirt. Right now the few things that are on my calendar are all written in so nicely with neat handwriting and crisp edges. There are no circled items and long arrows shifting things about. My world looks so neat and orderly. It won’t last. I know it won’t last. I’m sure but the end of the day at least one of the items on my calendar will have been circled and shifted to a new date. But at the moment I will revel in the temporary order. Just as later I will embrace the chaos. Such is life. So lets kick this new year off right with the first writing prompt of the new year. Are your timers ready? Set to fifteen minutes? Remember onece it starts ticking, don’t stop writing. Don’t stop and let your inner editor talk you out of the words that wnt to drip out of your brain. There will be time for editing later. For now, We write!
Well that was fun. I kind of want to see what other catastrophes I can put poor George through before he finds his path. Or let his ineptitude save the day. I’d probably decide which once I got going on the story. I suspect I’ll be circling back to George at some point. He seems like my kind of character.
Friday, January 1st: Only nine people attended the premier, and two fled during the first hour.
Only nine people attended the premier, and two fled during the first hour. It was disheartening for any company. They prepared to soldier on gathering their courage to face the stage for the second act when the police arrived. The sight of their leading man and one of the chorus girls being led away in handcuffs was too much for them.
For the crowd, such as it was, it was the highlight of the performance. All but one thought it was part of the play. It was later reviewed as an act of Avant garde brilliance in an otherwise drab performance.
It was their best review and despite the circumstances, George clipped the review from the paper in order to save it for his scrap book. The word Memories had long since been taped over with masking tape and in its place he used a large black permanent marker to write ‘Grim Reminders’ in its place.
The review went onto the last page and as always, with the new addition, he couldn’t help but flip through the pages to stare at his litany of failures. The play, indeed even the theater only occupied the last few pages.
Every endeavor he tried seemed to go horribly wrong somehow. His attempt to study science caused him to burn down one of the university’s labs and get him banned from campus. In business he managed to bankrupt an entire company that the rest of the world believed unsinkable in under two weeks.
The articles detailing its demise actually used the word unsinkable which was unfortunate as his next attempt at a career involved the utter destruction of a veritable fleet of fishing boats. George decided then and there that his life was a tragedy and that the theater might prove a better place for him. He also decided never to even dip a toe into the ocean again. He wasn’t entirely certain there was a Kraken, but if there was, he was certain he was on its hit list and thought it best not to take chances.
He had some mild successes in the theater. His early plays were considered triumphs of pathos and managed a few fairly decent reviews that weren’t entirely due to outside circumstances. True his one really good review was due to an electrical short that sent the fake fire set ablaze with actual fire. They had to pump oxygen into the leading actress in the last act but they adjusted the final scene to include the tank and the mask. She simply wouldn’t leave the stage until the show was finished and according to the paramedics who came with the firemen, it was the only way she wouldn’t suffer permanent lung damage.
The reviewers considered a triumph of realism and an ending of unexpected brilliance. Later attendees were not as pleased as the electric had been stabilized for later shows. In the end the profits realized ended up paying to have the smoke dry cleaned from the Diva’s wardrobe.
Ten til Midnight 