Indelible Freckles

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KINGSWOOD: Prelude

Last weekend, I nipped down to my oul’ hometoon and ran into this:

Photo1033

Cuba Street closed to traffic, its footpaths and road filthy with pedestrians, all of it sprinkled with light rain showers and a very family-friendly vibe: a street festival called Cuba Dupa. Nice. I walked past the crowded foodstalls with their mouthwatering aromas and found sanctuary in the cool and quiet Clark’s Cafe (where they still have cheesecake cup cakes, very nice indeedy).

Once fed, watered and rested,  I hop-skip-and-jumped over the unimaginatively named City to Sea Bridge to Circa Theatre where Kingswood won the 2015 Adam Award for Best Play by a Pasifika Playwright. I guess I’ll be revisiting that script sooner than planned.

While at the Adam Awards, I rubbed shoulders with:

  • Hone Kouka, co-winner of the 2015 Adam Award for Best New Zealand Play for Bless the Child, as well as winner of Best Play by a Maori Playwright;
  • runner-up Dean Parker with Polo (though I do prefer his initial title, Fear and Misery in the Third Term);
  • Michelanne Forster, winner of Best Play by a Woman Playwright for The Gift of Tongues;
  • author of the highly commended, Significance, Tom McCrory;
  • the always luminous Miria George;
  • the boundlessly talented Moana Ete;
  • Wellington man-about-town Jonathon Hendry;
  • the irrepressible KC Kelly;
  • David O’Donnell, fresh from directing Victor Rodger’s incendiary My Name is Gary Cooper in Hawaii;
  • and the Playmarket gang of Murray Lynch, Stuart Hoar, Salesi Leota, and Claire O’Loughlin.

That’s me: an utterly shameless name-dropper.

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KINGSWOOD: One Year On

Courtesy Sicnag at Wikimedia Commons
An Holden Kingswood HT stationwagon

I know. I know. You and I know what kicked this venture off, don’t we?

How hard could it be to write about four friends driving from Auckland to Wellington in a Kingswood stationwagon?

I have friends. We’ve had some adventures. We’ve fallen out and reunited. Some friends I’ve known for more than half of my life. No matter the physical distance or the years between catch-ups, I love them because they’re virtually family — the difference between them and blood relatives is that we chose each other.

So how frickin’ hard could it be to write about a bunch of friends travelling long distance in a classic car?

Harder than I expected. I first wrote it in a skeletal beatsheet form, rewrote it with some bits of dialogue and action in it, took it apart, reassembled it, rewrote it with more dialogue and action, pimped it this time last year, rewrote it, disassembled/reassembled/rewrote it, threw my hands up in exasperation, sulked, got over myself, rewrote it to a full and complete draft, then, despite vowing never to revisit it, revised that draft and…the first proper draft is finished. It’s currently with readers for their consideration.

What took so long? I hear you ask. This play took longer because it has much more of me in it than I bargained for: writing about love and friendship and history and forgiveness required an honesty that no amount of imaginative tap dancing could hide. It was exhausting.

I’m thoroughly sick of this play and hope to never see it again. But should a rehearsed reading be arranged and I get to hear and see it interpreted by people who have no agenda other than Let’s pretend, don’t be surprised if I think to myself, How hard could it be to revisit ‘Kingswood’ just one more time?

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Roadside Attractions

Once upon a time, The Dog and I went for a run, and on that run, she found a discarded rolled roast. Because I had no time for the dog to to be distracted by such a feast — we were on a run, after all — I carried that rolled roast all the way home, where she devoured it in a few blinks of an eye. This story has become a little apocryphal in the halls of Fortress Mamea because a). The Goddess was too slow to come and see our dog’s find, and b). cellphone cameras were a bit of a luxury back then.

Ever since, The Dog has dallied at the site of that glorious find, whether running or — of late — walking, hoping to find another rolled roast.

A fortnight into 2015, the universe relented:

 

A discarded leg of lamb.

There’s a lesson in this for my writing.

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2014

Goodness gracious, that’s 2014 done already.

Boring stats first. My exercise diary is a little depressing: less than half the number of runs this year than I would/should have on average (see here for where it all began) — but if I add the number of brisk walks and bike rides, too… total mileage is only a third of my annual average. Goodness gracious me. Future selfies for the blog will be from the chest upwards only. (Update: 2014’s mileage was actually two-thirds annual average — human error in the spreadsheet formulae.)

On to what this post is really for: what I watched on big screen and small. 128 titles were watched, equating to just over 500 viewing hours — and here’s what stuck:

Features

  • Enough Said
  • Monsters, which made me want to see Godzilla (which did not disappoint)
  • a dead heat between 20 Feet from Stardom and Fire in Babylon
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • Ida
  • Wreck It Ralph, with runners up The Lego Movie and Despicable Me
  • The Rover
  • The Lunchbox
  • Guardians of the Galaxy, with runner up Edge of Tomorrow
  • The Dark Horse

Television

Happy New Year!

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GOODBYE MY FELENI: por ahi

They’re playing our song stateside at the Rainbow Theatre, University of California, Santa Cruz, on Thursday 13 November, Saturday 15 November, and Friday 21 November 2014.

141113 Rainbow Theatre

If you’re in the neighbourhood and you’re curious about all the brouhaha, check it out (and report back, please, because I’m dashedly curious myself).

(Translation of “por ahi” — Spanish for “over there”.)

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Escape and Evasion

I was catching up on some small-screen viewing when I was presented with this:

[PREVIOUSLY: Our Hero has been investigating strange goings on when he is knocked out and thrown into a van by Mysterious Silhouettes.]

INT. VAN – NIGHT

Our HERO regains consciousness in the back of a VAN. There are silhouettes – one MALE and the other FEMALE hovering over him, passing streetlights zebra-striping them.

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

He’s coming to.

The Male Silhouette reaches down to our Hero --

MALE SILHOUETTE

Right then –

Our Hero swings wildly with his fist – despite the murkiness and shifting floorpan of the van he is rewarded with the thud and grunt of a kinghit!

He leaps to his feet, drags on a door handle and --

EXT. VAN + FOREST ROAD – CONTINUOUS

-- our Hero falls and rolls onto the grassy verge.

The van scrunches to a stop.

Our Hero scrambles to his feet as the van starts reversing.

EXT. FOREST + ROAD – CONTINUOUS

In the F.G. our Hero tumbles into the hollow of a LARGE TREE while --

-- in the B.G. the lights of the van come to a stop. The voices of his captors travel handily in the night-air:

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

Did you see which way?

MALE SILHOUETTE

We can’t just leave him –

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

He doesn’t know anything – let’s go!

Beat, then the slam of van doors and the van drives off.

Really? Someone’s looking into your highly secretive and illegal shit, you go to the trouble of abducting him, presumably to find out how much he knows and who he’s spoken with before you kill him and dump his body somewhere, but you don’t restrain him while he’s in your custody, so when your captive gets away from you, you go… He doesn’t know anything — let’s go!

Really?

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