It's happening

This all comes back to New Orleans. It all started that night that I was magnetized to the innards of that dive blues bar. Meeting some locals and hearing their stories, all with the beauteous backdrop of the live, warm, vibrational wavelengths of the blues.

I was blessed with a substantial amount of downtime on that shoot and had a lot of time to explore. I drank in all the artists, pouring their hearts out on the streets, open and on display.

And something happened. The part of me that had given up on everything ignited. The part of me that swore I’d never stop fighting, regardless of the difficulties and circumstances, surfaced.

I remember calling Adam that night after leaving the blues bar and all I could do was cry. I was sitting in some dark alley off of Bourbon Street sobbing uncontrollably for what felt like an eternity.

“I’m wasting my life. I’m holding back. These people have lost everything and they’re singing in the streets.”

The following night a co-worker took me out on a bender.
And I made a pact with the Universe that I wanted another shot.
The following day I was approached to develop the show.

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LA has been flooding my memory bank lately and I can’t help but to take it as a sign that production offices will be out of LA (and not NY). It makes sense: I need to come full circle with my LA experience.

During my tenure at Production Company Hell (let’s call it PCH, shall we? Actually the offices where just off of the PCH), I flourished…up until the point where I crashed.

I was the first intern to get hired into the company and quickly took on more and more responsibilities. At one point the CEO sat me down and said, “Okay. Rule number one is you don’t tell anyone your age (I was 19). Rule number two is you don’t tell anybody about your education (or lack thereof). I had a swarm of interns underneath me that had their masters and doctorate degrees from the UCLA and USC film programs for Christ’s sake.

As time passed I started hearing a lot of, “You’re going to make one helluva producer one day.”

I giggled. I blushed. I ate it up.

As more time passed and it continued to consume more and more of my time, my life, my responses morphed into, “No I’m not. There’s no way in hell that I’m gonna do this with the rest of my life. Absolutely not.”

Cut to: now.

The messages that keep coming my way re: the show are, “They’re likely gonna want you to stay on board, at least for the pilot season, as a producer…you know, to get it off the ground.”

“But I’m not a producer. I’m a writer.”

“Uh-huh, right. But this is your project. You are the nucleus of this thing. Who else is gonna steer the ship?”

Then it hit me.

We now have two LLCs under us: Sleep Deprivation Society, which houses the screenplays and now the show.

This is the third TV show we’ve created. The first one we were hired to develop and the second one was a parallel development to a new Spielberg/Burnett show that’s debuting soon.

We’ve written four screenplays, two of which have been optioned.

We’re currently shopping around an entertainment industry-based website concept (no. 1 on the list is the Spielberg/Burnett team that beat us to the punch with the show’s counterpart).

“Holy shit. I’m producing. Son of a bitch. They were right.”

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Last week while en route to Madison Market I had to stop at Vivace on Denny: I had an “aha” moment (it’s been raining these) and I had to write it down. Scribbling on a napkin, grinning ear-to-ear, I couldn’t help but to think, “It’s totally happening. I’m turning into this crazy writer that’s ducking into anywhere she can find a napkin.”

No bullshit: I currently have seven notebooks going, broken down by various content. Three of them have to be with me at all times.

The countdown is on: the pitches roll out in six weeks. And I’m going alone. I have the show pretty much set. What’s gotta happen now is the composition of the verbal pitch, the rehearsal and memorization, and then being able to deliver it w/out it feeling rehearsed and memorized.

And I have to work on reigning my energy in a bit. (Thank you to all the friends that have been putting up with my uber high-energyness.)

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So – it’s on. It’s happening. And this time my head is truly in the game. This time I’m not gonna walk away, no matter how intense it gets...