Week 3
“I Didn’t Come To This Copy Room To Make Friends”
Today I turned down free food for the first time. No one told me the stipulation for free pizza would be competing for a slice with summer camp kids! Don’t get me wrong, children are chill and the future or whatever, but I just feel bad about taking food from tiny people whose skulls probably aren’t fully developed yet.
Plus, it’s probably good I turned down one free thing of food. I’m getting to that point that whenever I see free food, I’m like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant when he’s eating the raw buffalo meat. I mean like, I’m not going to say no since it’s food, but I’m not going to feel good about that decision later on.
That being said, I saw the first preview of Pancakes, Pancakes on Tuesday. After seeing the run through two weeks ago, I must say that seeing the “Rooster” with a beak and tail is much more believable at this stage than it was when I saw him wearing sweat pants and Jordan’s.
The next day was really exciting! I spent the morning eating free pie from the break room, then in the afternoon, Ms. Celise, Emily, and I went on an adventure to the Horizon Theater. It was a bit of a trek on Marta to get there, but our gal squad managed to get there, even if I got a little sweaty in the process.
At Horizon, Ms. Celise and Emily talked on a panel with other representatives from other theaters to a group of young playwrights. They addressed how to get noticed with a script, avoiding disingenuous writing, but I think the most important thing I learned was what Ms. Celise and Emily do at work all day.
On the way back, we all bonded about the kinds of writing we don’t like, and I truly felt like we were The Plastics from Mean Girls, but in a cool literary, intellectual sense.
They also pointed out to me that the artistic department is basically consistent of a team of super cool women, and if that isn’t Sheryl Sandberg telling me to “Lean in” then I don’t really know what is! (Note to Sandberg, I understand “leaning in” is a big part of being a professional workplace, but what happens when I hit that mid-afternoon sugar crash and I want to “lie down”? Now, that’s a self-help book I would like to read.)
I then finished the day getting coffee with Emily as we talked about how Atlanta has way too many hills, and how we were entitled to this coffee since we probably hit our 10,000 iPhone steps for the day.
The next day I spent a large portion of the day printing out material for my Too Heavy For Your Pocket research binder. I no longer have intense printer anxiety since I’ve realized the copy room is a wonderful place for two important things. First, it’s a wonderful place to look at the pictures of puppies in the calendar on the bulletin board. (I am a sucker for this form of office place morale by way of picturesque puppies.) Second, I usually have elaborate fantasies that I am a Bachelor contestant and the printer is the Bachelor. I then re-enact said fantasies (mentally) by saying “I didn’t come to this copy room to make friends!” whenever someone walks in. Office place romance? Or am I just grossly over-caffeinating myself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0bOw1lqxBc
On the train that morning, I had the best idea for a children’s book, which I attribute to seeing Pancakes, Pancakes four times. The main premise for the book is that this girl becomes obsessed with Mexican wrestling, and when her mother is insulted by one of the meanest wrestlers in town, the girl attempts to master the amateur wrestling league and beat him at his own game. Think Nacho Libre meets Mulan. I think being in the mindset of a child has helped generate creative energy in that I was a little unproductive and spent a little bit googling “most popular Mexican girl names for 2002.”
Hopefully my supervisor doesn’t think I’m unproductive, I’ve actually been getting quite a bit done. I’m sure if you throw one of those dense research binders I’ve assembled at any living creature, it would maim, or seriously injure them. That is, if you can even pick up one of those binders in the first place.
