Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 24.1: May 9th, 2010
"Caramel Kisses" is an unfinished novel I began to write back in 2009 and stopped working on in 2010. The two main characters - Adriana Maguire Reynard and Emma Burking - would ultimately be revised for my later completed novella, "The Liffey Is Half-Asleep," in 2011. Several elements of "Liffey" can be found in their original forms in "Caramel Kisses," such as the characters' names, the haiku scene, and Adriana's penchant for writing.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Ten
by Belinda Roddie
My play was accepted for an original drama festival in San Francisco, to be held in October. It was a standard original work celebration, rife with pieces too erotic or graphic to be put on by any mainstream theater company, but in my burst of pride and disbelief I pictured it all done like a Shakespeare festival, with tambourines and flutes being played as we did an old-fashioned gala on the stage. I laughed at it all and at myself for imagining the whole ridiculous thing, then kissed the letter and took the check for two thousand dollars and kissed that as well. I didn’t care if some of it was to go toward actually seeing the show, or perhaps marching in to give my usual two cents, the great playwright, with that one random tragicomedy that was at least worth a couple grand.
The director who was to work on my play was the perfect kind of oddball. As a writer, I had always approved of theater people who had a comfortable place in reality, but had ideas that could distort the very fabrics of said reality. This director’s name was Anthony Abhay Hudd, a quirky little Indian-American man with a dark goatee and enormous blue eyes. He had energy and a pulse to him that made up for his stature, as if each of his limbs were a dark wire that coiled and sprung as he moved and talked. Even the veins in his hands, as he held a mug of black coffee while we sat in a small diner, seemed to twist and bend in an electrically charged dance.
“I’m thinking that the setting should be sort of a combination between live media and still life,” he told me as I sat over a plate of curly fries and chewed away at them as he talked. It was a warm afternoon and I had a craving for bad food. “You know, some film projections upstage mixed with some paintings or more renaissance-based art. Maybe even some sculptures added to the mix. But we don’t want the whole thing to be too gaudy, now do we? But something alive, something to represent the characters as they tell their stories.”
“Sounds like a play I worked on for a high school project,” I said, and it did. I had had my share of stage managing, so I had a fair knowledge of what Hudd was going on about. The drama class had performed a stainless steel-type production of The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt, all emphasis on grays and overly polished themes, with each starkly painted column holding a projected image of a painting or photo in the background. Of course, with that came some concerns. “Would we be able to use media without any technical issues?”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about that,” Hudd assured me, and he grimaced as he drank his coffee and I wondered why he wouldn’t just add sugar to the stuff already. “I have a good friend who’s an absolute wiz at production and media design. Name’s Sean Leslie. He’s fallen head over heels for your play. Truth is, I haven’t been able to work with him since we both graduated from the same class at SF State. Did you go to SF State, Miss Reynard?”
I shook my head. “University of Redlands.”
“Ah,” Hudd said, smirking. “So you got to endure the cardboard cut-out of the theatrical world down south. Good, you’ve been challenged by the Hollywood media.”
I raised an eyebrow at this, but I knew what he meant – he was pleased that I hadn’t been “corrupted” or “distorted” by the apparently toxic Southern Californian culture; that I could still write plays that were different and unintentionally avant-garde. I was admittedly tempted to fill Hudd in on the countless shows I’d seen in Los Angeles or Orange County that had been more radical than some of the stuff I’d seen here in the foggy city. However, I decided against it, figuring that it’d kill the magic for the poor guy.
The rest of our meeting went on like this, with Hudd pitching ideas about stage set-up and costume design and different styles of theatrical directing. He asked if I preferred a Brechtian style directing to my play, an Artaud approach, perhaps a call back to the age of the Globe before the Puritans bolted it up with locks and religious denouncements. I could only shrug at his suggestions and smile as he attempted to please me with references that only a die-hard theater lover could truly relate to.
“Don’t try to direct like anyone else. I just want what’s in my play to be emphasized, period,” I said. “The emotions, the dialogue, the characters. The best way to do that is for you to decide. Direct it Hudd-style.”
Hudd looked puzzled at this, as if he wasn’t used to getting so few guidelines from a playwright who looked as if she wanted to revive the performance art entirely. But all I did was shake his hand and thank him, walking out of that diner grinning at the irony of a supposedly freelance director looking lost when he had almost all the freedom he wanted. Oh, well. Such was the way of this society, I thought. We loved our rules, no matter how many times we desired to break them.
I stepped back into my apartment to see cheap-looking “Congratulations!” banners set up with pushpins around the dining room. Queen’s “We Are the Champions” was playing in the background, and I laughed as I saw Emma lip-synching to it enthusiastically before giving me a muscle-constricting hug as Milo mewed curiously from the corner.
“I started making some chocolate fudge for you,” she said. “In honor of your play. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
“But it’s the wrong season. Fudge is for Christmas.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “It is never the wrong season for fudge,” she said, and she stuck out her tongue out at me when my body language gave away the fact that no matter what, I agreed with her. We were getting used to our different ways of teasing one another, as she went back to stirring the clumps of sugars that slowly caramelized at the bottom of the pot.
I sat down and watched her work from the counter, petting Milo as he leapt onto my lap and promptly fell asleep as my legs pulsed from his loud, satisfied purring. Emma noticed me observing her and grinned.
“What?”
“I hope you don’t turn into a 50’s wife on me,” I said, a small smirk dancing on my lips. “All that baking. You’re gonna make me look bad.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Because if you keep at it, I’m going to need to get a real office job and wear suits and work eight hours a day,” I replied, and I shifted in my chair and Milo gave me a dirty look through narrowed eyes. Emma seemed amused by it, though.
“Don’t be silly.”
“What, you wouldn’t want that?” I asked. “You don’t want that door to swing open with me standing there, all spruced up with a gelled crew-cut and a necktie and a tweed jacket and a suitcase?” I craned my head back and drew out a long, throaty, “ ‘Ho-ney! I’m ho-ome!’” which so startled the poor tabby on my knees that he tore away in a gray blur and found a safe spot on the counter beside Emma, leaving slight puncture wounds in my jeans.
“Adriana!” Emma scolded me, but I laughed and assumed a manly swagger and she laughed too and moved like Marilyn Monroe, blowing kisses in my general direction.
The music from the CD player had lapsed into a Supremes song, one I loved despite its somewhat sad lyrics amid a happy-sounding melody. I suddenly felt this urge to dance, which was unorthodox for me because I thought I was a terrible dancer. I made sidesteps toward Emma to the beat, loosening an imaginary necktie and moving to sweep that beauty into my arms and carry her along to that upbeat tempo. She played along for a bit, taking moments to keep that wooden spoon stirring up the sugar while the stove pulsed with a red glow. I felt my legs wobble in a disoriented groove and Diana Ross’s voice squealed those classic lyrics. And suddenly I thought of a familiar voice mixing with hers, in a strangely compatible harmony:
You can’t hurry love
No, you just have to wait
Just trust in the good times
No matter how my heart breaks
“She sounds just like my mom!” I exclaimed over the music, and I looped Emma around in a twirl as she attempted to keep an eye on the pot in front of her.
“How so?”
“All this ‘you can’t hurry love’ shit. Well, I didn’t really follow the rules, did I?”
Emma grinned. “Guess we both got lucky.”
I stopped dancing after a bit because my knees were popping and I was out of breath, and as Emma focused back on her culinary technique, I watched her as she swirled the cocoa into the pot, the marshmallow paste and the butter, and all I could smell around me was the rich chocolate and I smiled with the Supremes ringing in my ears. With a play in the works and a piece of fudge on my tongue and the music coaxing me to move forward, to be more of a partner and less of a lover to Emma, my little Elven queen, my Roman goddess – it was all turning out to be a very good week.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Ten
by Belinda Roddie
My play was accepted for an original drama festival in San Francisco, to be held in October. It was a standard original work celebration, rife with pieces too erotic or graphic to be put on by any mainstream theater company, but in my burst of pride and disbelief I pictured it all done like a Shakespeare festival, with tambourines and flutes being played as we did an old-fashioned gala on the stage. I laughed at it all and at myself for imagining the whole ridiculous thing, then kissed the letter and took the check for two thousand dollars and kissed that as well. I didn’t care if some of it was to go toward actually seeing the show, or perhaps marching in to give my usual two cents, the great playwright, with that one random tragicomedy that was at least worth a couple grand.
The director who was to work on my play was the perfect kind of oddball. As a writer, I had always approved of theater people who had a comfortable place in reality, but had ideas that could distort the very fabrics of said reality. This director’s name was Anthony Abhay Hudd, a quirky little Indian-American man with a dark goatee and enormous blue eyes. He had energy and a pulse to him that made up for his stature, as if each of his limbs were a dark wire that coiled and sprung as he moved and talked. Even the veins in his hands, as he held a mug of black coffee while we sat in a small diner, seemed to twist and bend in an electrically charged dance.
“I’m thinking that the setting should be sort of a combination between live media and still life,” he told me as I sat over a plate of curly fries and chewed away at them as he talked. It was a warm afternoon and I had a craving for bad food. “You know, some film projections upstage mixed with some paintings or more renaissance-based art. Maybe even some sculptures added to the mix. But we don’t want the whole thing to be too gaudy, now do we? But something alive, something to represent the characters as they tell their stories.”
“Sounds like a play I worked on for a high school project,” I said, and it did. I had had my share of stage managing, so I had a fair knowledge of what Hudd was going on about. The drama class had performed a stainless steel-type production of The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt, all emphasis on grays and overly polished themes, with each starkly painted column holding a projected image of a painting or photo in the background. Of course, with that came some concerns. “Would we be able to use media without any technical issues?”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about that,” Hudd assured me, and he grimaced as he drank his coffee and I wondered why he wouldn’t just add sugar to the stuff already. “I have a good friend who’s an absolute wiz at production and media design. Name’s Sean Leslie. He’s fallen head over heels for your play. Truth is, I haven’t been able to work with him since we both graduated from the same class at SF State. Did you go to SF State, Miss Reynard?”
I shook my head. “University of Redlands.”
“Ah,” Hudd said, smirking. “So you got to endure the cardboard cut-out of the theatrical world down south. Good, you’ve been challenged by the Hollywood media.”
I raised an eyebrow at this, but I knew what he meant – he was pleased that I hadn’t been “corrupted” or “distorted” by the apparently toxic Southern Californian culture; that I could still write plays that were different and unintentionally avant-garde. I was admittedly tempted to fill Hudd in on the countless shows I’d seen in Los Angeles or Orange County that had been more radical than some of the stuff I’d seen here in the foggy city. However, I decided against it, figuring that it’d kill the magic for the poor guy.
The rest of our meeting went on like this, with Hudd pitching ideas about stage set-up and costume design and different styles of theatrical directing. He asked if I preferred a Brechtian style directing to my play, an Artaud approach, perhaps a call back to the age of the Globe before the Puritans bolted it up with locks and religious denouncements. I could only shrug at his suggestions and smile as he attempted to please me with references that only a die-hard theater lover could truly relate to.
“Don’t try to direct like anyone else. I just want what’s in my play to be emphasized, period,” I said. “The emotions, the dialogue, the characters. The best way to do that is for you to decide. Direct it Hudd-style.”
Hudd looked puzzled at this, as if he wasn’t used to getting so few guidelines from a playwright who looked as if she wanted to revive the performance art entirely. But all I did was shake his hand and thank him, walking out of that diner grinning at the irony of a supposedly freelance director looking lost when he had almost all the freedom he wanted. Oh, well. Such was the way of this society, I thought. We loved our rules, no matter how many times we desired to break them.
I stepped back into my apartment to see cheap-looking “Congratulations!” banners set up with pushpins around the dining room. Queen’s “We Are the Champions” was playing in the background, and I laughed as I saw Emma lip-synching to it enthusiastically before giving me a muscle-constricting hug as Milo mewed curiously from the corner.
“I started making some chocolate fudge for you,” she said. “In honor of your play. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
“But it’s the wrong season. Fudge is for Christmas.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “It is never the wrong season for fudge,” she said, and she stuck out her tongue out at me when my body language gave away the fact that no matter what, I agreed with her. We were getting used to our different ways of teasing one another, as she went back to stirring the clumps of sugars that slowly caramelized at the bottom of the pot.
I sat down and watched her work from the counter, petting Milo as he leapt onto my lap and promptly fell asleep as my legs pulsed from his loud, satisfied purring. Emma noticed me observing her and grinned.
“What?”
“I hope you don’t turn into a 50’s wife on me,” I said, a small smirk dancing on my lips. “All that baking. You’re gonna make me look bad.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Because if you keep at it, I’m going to need to get a real office job and wear suits and work eight hours a day,” I replied, and I shifted in my chair and Milo gave me a dirty look through narrowed eyes. Emma seemed amused by it, though.
“Don’t be silly.”
“What, you wouldn’t want that?” I asked. “You don’t want that door to swing open with me standing there, all spruced up with a gelled crew-cut and a necktie and a tweed jacket and a suitcase?” I craned my head back and drew out a long, throaty, “ ‘Ho-ney! I’m ho-ome!’” which so startled the poor tabby on my knees that he tore away in a gray blur and found a safe spot on the counter beside Emma, leaving slight puncture wounds in my jeans.
“Adriana!” Emma scolded me, but I laughed and assumed a manly swagger and she laughed too and moved like Marilyn Monroe, blowing kisses in my general direction.
The music from the CD player had lapsed into a Supremes song, one I loved despite its somewhat sad lyrics amid a happy-sounding melody. I suddenly felt this urge to dance, which was unorthodox for me because I thought I was a terrible dancer. I made sidesteps toward Emma to the beat, loosening an imaginary necktie and moving to sweep that beauty into my arms and carry her along to that upbeat tempo. She played along for a bit, taking moments to keep that wooden spoon stirring up the sugar while the stove pulsed with a red glow. I felt my legs wobble in a disoriented groove and Diana Ross’s voice squealed those classic lyrics. And suddenly I thought of a familiar voice mixing with hers, in a strangely compatible harmony:
You can’t hurry love
No, you just have to wait
Just trust in the good times
No matter how my heart breaks
“She sounds just like my mom!” I exclaimed over the music, and I looped Emma around in a twirl as she attempted to keep an eye on the pot in front of her.
“How so?”
“All this ‘you can’t hurry love’ shit. Well, I didn’t really follow the rules, did I?”
Emma grinned. “Guess we both got lucky.”
I stopped dancing after a bit because my knees were popping and I was out of breath, and as Emma focused back on her culinary technique, I watched her as she swirled the cocoa into the pot, the marshmallow paste and the butter, and all I could smell around me was the rich chocolate and I smiled with the Supremes ringing in my ears. With a play in the works and a piece of fudge on my tongue and the music coaxing me to move forward, to be more of a partner and less of a lover to Emma, my little Elven queen, my Roman goddess – it was all turning out to be a very good week.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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