OK, so I run into people I've been feeling guilty about ignoring for months (a good thing, in case you wondered - the running into them, not the ignoring), I'm offered the chance to make a little bit of money over the winter, Michael Lutin turns out to have a speaking engagement only five hours from where I live and then a submission opportunity that a play of mine actually fits pops up in my mailbox.
Full length? Check.
Unpublished? Check again.
Unproduced? Definitely.
Comedic? Black, but also a check.
Submission deadline? Midnight last night, just as Jupiter-Uranus aspect perfects.
Complete Jupiter-Uranus woo-woo factor? Play deals with death of the Princess of Wales, yesterday was 17th anniversary of *the fatal car crash*
Requirements: ten sample pages, resume, synopsis of play and cover letter.
Synopsis and cover letter I have, ten sample pages takes me a couple of hours to pick out - I did five from Act I and five from Act II and had to reformat it all as switching to Word from Final Draft stripped out all the formatting, I added character breakdown and all that stuff, cover letter takes more time than I want to admit, and just as I'm about to hit "send" I notice the email address for submissions to the theater has dot org at the end instead of dot com.
A quick google, and I realize I'm sending the play off to a non-profit dedicated to spreading cancer awareness, not quite the venue one would choose for a black comedy about an embittered middle-aged woman's search for her father, most of it in appalling bad rhyming couplets.
Nothing ventured nothing gained and all that, and I hit "send" anyway, looking on the bright side and realizing I now had a Word document I could send as a submission enquiry to a theater where I might have a remote chance of the play even being considered, should I, of course, ever sit down and actually research theaters in the U.K. that might take something unsolicited.
Shaking her head ruefully, she got up from her desk chair and went to the kitchen, where so help me god so help me jesus there on the floor by the french doors, presumably having just slithered its way under the door from the back patio, was a snake - not a very long one and not a very fat one but a frigging snake none-the-less - on the kitchen floor and about to wriggle off into the pantry and make itself at home curled up by the vacuum cleaner for ever unless I, Pamela Rose Reeves, having lived in a city for 67 of my 69 years, did something about it.
It involved a broom and a lot of hopping about and yelping, but I did it, and I leave it to you, Tonstant Weader, as Dorothy Parker said in her review of "The House at Pooh Corner" in The New Yorker, to google the symbolism of snakes by yourself.
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