Playin

My MFA online school semester just ended. I need to take the summer off. This semester was a doozy and I just took one class at University of New Orleans. Yes, everything is remote, asynchronous they call it. On a platform called Moodle. I've grown accustomed to it. The technology is not the issue. I am the issue. 

The biggest issue is that I can't give less than 100 percent. Seriously, it's a problem. My "Adaption" class this semester was with a pretty well known playwright from Louisiana. And I decided, on a lark, well not really because it was begging for an adaptation, that I was going to adapt my 200 plus page memoir into a stage play. Everyone else in the class adapted someone else's work. Some people did prose into poetry, and vice versa. And others did shorter pieces. A couple of others did a stage play, but they had very simplified clean concepts.

The teacher/playwright was clear. We could do as simple or as complicated a project as we chose and would be judged on what we accomplished of our goals at semester's end. 

Of course, I chose not just complicated, but downright fucking impossible. Impossible. A three act play adaption of my memoir.

Mind you, I've never written a stage play before although I've always wanted to. I didn't know how to. No idea. No formatting experience. And think about it, my memoir took 15 years, how in the hell did I think I could do an adaption in three months?

So I started writing this adaptation late night and early morning. On weekends, I would wake up early. I don't know how I got myself into this. It just happened. I told myself. You'll do a couple hours a day. You can do it. Then the first weekend, I spent one full day. A full day. 

Physically, it was hard too. I threw my fifty year old neck out writing it. Emotionally, I went through the wringer. Traumatizing myself about my dad's death, which is memorialized in my memoir, all over again. Crying. Hysterically at times. Some days, I felt like Diane Keaton where she portrays a playwright in that movie with Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves, the one where she's writing the play at the end sobbing. Most days, I wept into my computer. I'm lucky I did not short it out. Or myself. 

I cursed my ambitious self often. Saying aloud, more than once. Why do I do this to myself? I'm a masochist, a damn masochist. One night, a Saturday, after a full work day on Friday, I woke up at at 3 am, drank three espressos and worked straight through for seven hours. I was obsessed I must admit. Compulsive. A bit manic at times. Pencils in my messy bun. Notes and crumbled pieces of pink post it notes everywhere. Re read my own memoir twice. Or maybe three times. 

In the end? I did it. I accomplished the miracle. A workable first draft. Two acts, not three, but it's cool. Not perfect, but awesome as hell. I have a stage play. I don't know how I did it. Maybe, just maybe, I manifested that shit into being. Seriously. Something was working through me at times.

And importantly too, or maybe not at all really because I'm not doing it for the grade, although my long suffering husband might disagree, I got an A. An A. On my first adaptation. Most importantly, I give myself an A plus for effort and dedication.