Popping Cherries

So here it is, my foray into the blog world.  My good friend, the Baron’s Wife, convinced me to do this over dinner last night and I thought, oh, what the hell?  Later on, this thought blossomed in to oh, what the hell… do I have to write that anyone would be interested in?

So, a primer.  I’ve worked in TV writers rooms for seven years.  Five in sitcom, two in drama.  Major network shows.  I actually wrote part of an episode, so now I get to call myself writer.  I’ve got an agent.  All I’m missing is, well, a staff, regular job as a writer on a current show that’s on air.  That’s been coming for some time now.  I’m all packed.  My dress is pressed.  I’m wondering if I need to start showing my garter to cars rushing past.  Perhaps a cartoon will stop and pick me up.  I can totally write a lascivious wolf.  Graaow.

In the meantime, I’m flush in writing pilots.  One’s in development, and three others are floating around in various stages of being ignored or barely read by my agents.  The fun thing about writing TV pilots for me, though, is discovering what I’m going to write and then researching it.  I’m not sure what other people do, but for me, something catches my fancy like, say, the UFC.  You know how much I knew about the UFC when I thought: interesting?  I thought it was the same as WWF.  Or WWE.  Whatever that thing on USA is that caters to the newly arrived alien to our planet with no appreciation of how gravity and/or physics and/or the human body works.  For them, WWF (or WWE) must rock. 

I wanted the UFC.

So, I got books from the library, rented DVDs from Netflix.  It’s possible I’m the only girl who watched entire seasons of Ultimate Fighter in a row while knitting (I knit) and got to say she was “working.”  That’s just part of it, though.  You can’t just fictionalize a reality show and expect it to work.  Like making a version of “Survivor” where it’s these people who, I don’t know, maybe have survived a plane crash on a deserted island.  Or IS it deserted?  What if there are OTHERS?  Wait….

I digress. 

When it gets interesting is when two things happen.  The first is you watch a show on cable about a Cultural Anthropologist who moves in with low riders in Austin, and then all of a sudden, you have the beginnings of a fish out of water story.  A guy observing a gym of Ultimate Fighters in training, studying their lingo, their traditions, their culture, in a way to serve it up as a “cultural study” to the New York Times readers.  Huh.  And then the second thing that happens is you find out that the Ultimate Fighter who comes from a good family background is rare.  These are kids who have had to fight from the very beginning, and I remembered something I read recently that abused kids are the best Human Lie Detectors on the planet.  Think about it.  They had their eyes glued to their parents, sensed every word, every muscle twitch, every mood.  You had to know when danger was coming because danger was getting the shit pounded out of you.  (or maybe just a little rosette you have to pluck out of your underpants and deposit in the toilet afterwards, but that’s not my story)  They learned what was real and what wasn’t really quickly, and these are guys I want to know about, to write about.

And then I start thinking about masculinity and I think, well, this Anthroplogist had to do something before his UFC studies and what if it was about the Gossip Girl crowd and that’s where he’s met his wife, the ultimate, family money, liberated chick who likes her poor little boy husband and what happens in that marriage when they move to Vegas and her husband starts to slip into the skins of his new subjects of study and how does that change how he sees his own masculinity and his role in this marriage?

For me, that’s how an idea happens.  And that’s what I’m working on, and this is what I was telling the Baron’s Wife about last night when she said, you should start a blog.

So, I did.  Here it is.  Welcome.

Tags: cultural anthropologists, heart transplant, knitting, organ harvesting, pilot ideas, TV pilot, TV writer, UFC, writers room