When Harry Met Sally 2

 Recently a Twitter buddy of mine noted that the three major forces behind When Harry Met Sally – Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, and Rob Reiner – are all still alive. And that the original film featured “interviews” with various older couples telling their stories.

And that Harry/Sally needs a sequel.

At first I was dubious, because, you know, leave well enough alone. But I did concede it would be fun to re-film the last two minutes of the film, so that an “older” Harry and Sally could now tell their story looking back with the benefit of their aged faces.

And then. Then I got to thinking.

While it’s true that the core three are still alive, a number of the people in the film aren’t with us anymore. Most importantly, Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher, who played their best friends who got married and, among other things, promised that they’d never be out there (single) again.

But what if… all that changed?

And here’s where we bring in some other important things: Namely, that Rob Reiner is still very good friends with Christopher Guest and his wife, Jamie Lee Curtis. Who weren’t anywhere in When Harry Met Sally.

So this time, instead of telling a love story, let’s tell a friendship story.

Harry and Sally have had, by all accounts, a good life. Sally retired from journalism as journalism started to crumble and Harry got out of political consulting just before the world went insane. Their two best friends died, even after thinking they’d never be out there again.

Harry and Sally got through COVID, but it was rough without their friends. And now, they feel like they need new friends, but don’t know how to make them.

Until one day, they meet another older couple: Bruno and Carrie.

How do friendships work today? Do they call their friends, like they used to? Do they text back and forth, which is so much more common today?

The foursome navigate social media together to keep up with what’s happening with their kids and grandkids.

They talk about their kids (Bruno and Carrie adopted and have a trans child, Harry and Sally had a birth daughter who hadn’t met the right person and doesn’t think she could justify having a child).

They talk about trying to fill up their retired life. (We thought about going on vacation, but what are we going on vacation from? It isn’t work. It’s not the kids. I’ve seen the world. I like my mattress. My back already hurts, why make it hurt more by sleeping on a bed whose mattress was last replaced when Biden was in short pants?)

The title of the film is When Harry and Sally Met Bruno and Carrie, and much like the first film was debating and discussing relationships and love, this one is about friendship and trying to squeeze the last little bit of joy out of life because you never know when it’s all going to be over.

And while Nora Ephron, who wrote the original screenplay, is also gone, her sister Delia just wrote a memoir about her own second chance at life after losing her sister and husband.

I mean, I feel like I deserve a story credit for doing this much work, but you can see it, right?

Fairy Godmother-In-Law

 

When you’ve been on as many blind dates as I have, you come to recognize “The Moment.”

What I mean is this:

“The Moment” is that very second, that very instant, that you know when a date is going to end well, or going to end poorly.

I’m not talking about whether or not you’re getting invited up for a drink. I’m not even talking about whether there’s a goodnight kiss or a second date in your future. I’m talking about “The Moment” – that second where you either relax and start to enjoy yourself, or realize that you are in for the kind of night where you try to memorize all the horrible details, so that you can at least get an amusing anecdote out of it.

I wish I could say this was a funny story.

Maybe it’ll be funny to you.

***

My date with Jennifer was, naturally, set up by my mother. I say this is natural because she’s been “retired” since she was about twenty-five.

It’s an odd story.

I never knew my dad. The way my mom tells it, he was handsome and dashing, and even though he took off the minute he found out that he’d impregnated my mother, she still refers to him as, “My knight in shining armor.”

I finally got one of my aunts to spill the beans about the guy responsible for half my DNA after plying her with several beers at a family reunion. It seems that the guy left mom with some sort of strange trust fund setup, which meant she could quit her job at the local supermarket, deliver me, and live off some variety of compound interest.

(It also left us with enough money that I could see a really great shrink about my issues with my absent father. My doctor said, and I quote, “If he left you with enough money to pay my fees, you don’t really need me. You need a girlfriend and a hobby. In that order.”)

My mom needed a hobby as well.

What I mean is this:

If you’re thirty-seven years old, and you’ve never been married, and your mother doesn’t have a job, you become her hobby.

When I asked my mother what she knew about Jennifer, mom clammed up. Which was different.

Most mothers, when setting their kid up on a date, want to talk the girl up. She’s so smart, or so pretty, or so well-liked, or so talented, or in one memorable case, “So rich she’s worth marrying just to knock her up and get a divorce so you can get partial custody and some rockin’ child support and I can be a grandma and I don’t have to worry about your financial security any more.”

But Jennifer? Nothing. No info. I eventually got my mother to admit that she’d met Jennifer’s mother at her book club, where they’d been reading their way through a popular series involving wizards and witches and their many adventures at school.

(When I pointed out to my mother that the books were supposed to be for kids, she admitted that the club had tried to read “Pride and Prejudice” first, only to discover that everyone had opted to watch the movie instead of slogging through page after page of turgid prose.)

“Do you know anything about Jennifer at all?”

“Well, her mother is very… unique. I thought that if Jennifer was anything like her, perhaps you’d get along.”

“Unique?” I pressed.

“It means,” sighed mom, “that I’ve been setting you up with normal women for years and none of them have worked out, and perhaps if you try eating the fried Oreo instead of getting the same old chocolate cake again, maybe you’ll find you like the new flavor.”

I love my mother, but her metaphors border on lunatic babbling sometimes.

***

Going on a blind date is not unlike trying to solve a murder mystery before you hit the last page.

What I mean is this:

Everything you discover about your date is a clue about who she is and how the night might go, starting with her place of residence.

When you get to her house or apartment complex, you generally know what kind of neighborhood you’re in, and how much it costs to live there.

Jennifer lived on the fourth floor of a five-floor walkup, in an okay-but-not-great part of town. Which said to me she was probably working a blue-or-pink-collar job and paying all the bills under her own steam.

So I was somewhat surprised, when the front door of her apartment presented me not with a woman in her mid-thirties, but a woman in her mid-sixties.

Her hair was short, and a perfect, uniform white. The kind of white you only see on old people wearing wigs. Her shapeless dress was covered by a bizarre white robe shot through with some sort of metallic piping.

Gold, maybe? Silver? Hard to tell.

Also, she was holding a stick.

I stood there for a moment, as it finally hit me why my mother hadn’t told me anything about Jennifer. She was old enough to be a grandmother.

“Good evening, Jennifer,” I said, when the saliva returned to my mouth.

The woman in the door sized me up.

“I’m not Jennifer.”

“Oh,” I said.

Now, perhaps that looked a lot like “The Moment,” to you, and on paper, I can understand that. But rest assured, that was not it.

Granted, I was in trouble. At this point, I had possibly insulted Jennifer, and possibly insulted her, what? Mother? Grandmother? Aunt?

I finally decided to plunge right in. “I mean, by, um – by saying ‘Oh,’ I meant, ‘Oh, of course you’re not Jennifer.’”

That was also not the moment.

The next moment was.

What I mean is this:

The woman in the doorway extended her hand. The hand not holding a stick.

“I’m her fairy godmother,” she said.

“Her godmother?” I replied, as I took her hand, and gave it what I hoped was a firm-but-not-too-firm shake.

“Fairy godmother,” she repeated.

Now, I’ve had “The Moment” early on before, but this was kind of a first. I had always at least met my date before I realized that things were just not going to end well.

You can judge me if you want to, but people have gone to war on less substantial grounds than the one that caused me to step through the doorway, rather than fake a sudden urge to vomit while manufacturing a story about how my lunch meat had smelled a little “off” earlier in the day.

When it comes down to it, though, I was lonely, and in my late thirties.

Plus, hey, it looked like it had the makings of a great story, assuming I made it through the entire evening. “And then, before I even got in the door? I met her fairy godmother. She even had a wand. Well, a stick, but you know…”

Jennifer’s fairy godmother turned her back to me for a moment. “Jennifer! Your date’s here!”

I heard a faint “Coming!” from behind a door just outside my line of vision.

The white-haired woman turned to face me again. “Typical princess,” she said. “Always running ‘just a little late,’ don’t you know.”

“I – uh – I don’t mind,” I replied, unsure of what to say. I’d dealt with a few meddling mothers before, including one who took pictures of me with my date before heading off, as though it was prom we were going to, and not a first date at a minor league baseball game. A minor league baseball game where we bought a lot of beer because we were both over the legal age by a decade, and had discovered that we had only one thing in common: we hated her mother.

“You should,” she replied, glancing over her shoulder again. “If you can’t put a princess in her place right off the bat, she’ll walk all over you.”

At a loss for anything else to say, I opened my mouth to ask the Fairy Godmother if they lived together, when Jennifer stepped out of her bedroom, dressed for – something other than what I had planned for the night.

What I mean is this:

I came to her house in my usual first-date garb. Khaki pants, turtleneck, sport coat, loafers. If you’re a guy, you’ll recognize this as an easy dress-up-dress-down outfit. Good enough to get you into a reasonably upscale eatery, but not out of place at a bar, either.

She was wearing – and I am not exaggerating to make this story more amusing – a ball gown and a tiara.

I think there are probably some girls who could have pulled this off – but Jennifer wasn’t one of them. It’s not that she was unattractive, not really, but she wasn’t hot or gorgeous or stunning, or really any descriptive term that I could think of outside of ordinary.

Her straight brown hair was ordinary. As was her face. As was her figure. As were her other accessories, which consisted of an ordinary purse that didn’t go with her odd ensemble, and some unmemorable jewelry.

That was the moment when I decided to bail out. I breathed in, willing my brain to come up with a reason I couldn’t go out – and found a stick pressing against my nose.

Well, okay, it was kind of up my nose.

Jennifer’s fairy godmother leaned forward, and in a voice I’m sure only I could hear, said:

“If you hurt her, I will turn you into a toad.”

The moment she stopped talking, she took a step back from me, and said, pleasantly, “Sorry about that. The old balance isn’t what it used to be, you know? I’m constantly bumping into things.”

“It’s true,” confirmed Jennifer.

“No harm done,” I said. I turned to Jennifer. “Shall we?”

Jennifer stepped up to the woman in the robe and pecked her on the cheek. “Don’t wait up.”

“Oh, you know me,” she replied. “Won’t be able to sleep a wink until I hear you come clumping into the apartment.”

“I won’t keep her out late,” I said, and Jennifer followed me out the door.

***

As I let Jennifer into the car, I realized that I had a serious problem. Outside of the threat to turn me into a toad. So, two problems, really.

I had no real place that I could take a woman in a ball gown. The eatery I had chosen was on something of a mid-range scale, much like my clothing for the night. There were better restaurants in town, and I ate out often enough to get preferential treatment at a few of them (provided I tipped everyone well).

But were any of them ball-gown-worthy? No.

I got into the driver’s seat and looked at my date, who smiled and blushed. “Sorry about that. She can be…” she took a moment to select a word, “overprotective.”

“I… ” I began to say, then trailed off. What was there to say about a woman who clearly needed a visit from the nice young men in their clean white coats? “You know what? Let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s worry about where we’re going to eat.”

“I thought you picked a place,” she replied.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure if it’s quite up to the task of working with that dress.”

Jennifer looked at me, uncertain. “This old thing?” I was reasonably sure she wasn’t kidding.

“You know what? Why don’t we just go to the place I have a reservation for.”

***

Mel’s had been one of my favorite places to eat when I was younger, and it remained so even now. Most of the reason I loved it was because it never changed.

Literally.

The place had been built twenty years before I was born, and when you walked into the restaurant, it was like stepping back in time just a little ways. The waitresses wore the same uniforms they wore sixty years ago. Any and all furniture that had been replaced matched the original décor exactly.

And the menus were still the same large, handwritten, leatherbound menus Mel’s had used the day it had opened.

The menus were part of the reason I dug the place so much – there were no prices on them.

Mel was something of a genius that way. He had decided, as he handmade the menus himself all those decades ago, to not bother writing down any of the prices, so that he would never have to replace them. He would simply tell his clients what the prices were.

The waitresses had never been overjoyed about this.

But I loved it. The food wasn’t cheap, perhaps, but neither was it overpriced. And since my dates generally didn’t want to split the bill with me, I looked good, because most of them assumed that if you had to ask for a price, you probably couldn’t afford it.

Yes, it was a sleazy tactic. Thanks for noticing.

We were shown to our table, and we made small talk while we decided what to order.

Once our drinks were in place, and we were waiting for food, I decided to push for actual information – a commodity that, even after sitting in her vicinity for more than half an hour, I was still in short supply of.

“So,” I said, “what is it that you do?”

Jennifer took a sip of her wine. “Oh, you know. This and that.”

“I’m sorry, I should have clarified. What do you do for a living?” I asked.

Jennifer stared at me blankly.

I tried again. “Your job? Where do you work?”

“Oh, I see. No, I don’t do that,” she said.

“You don’t work?”

“No. Mother would never allow it. She thinks it’s beneath me.”

“Working is beneath you?”

“Well, I am a princess,” she said.

Now, I’ve dated a few “princesses” in my life. I’ve dated the girls that wore t-shirts that said Princess, I’ve dated girls that have said, “I want to be treated like a princess,” and I have, in fact, dated a girl whose name was Princess.

But this was the first time I had one claim to be actual royalty.

I took a large bite of the warm bread that had been brought to the table, and chewed slowly, giving myself as much time to think as I possibly could.

The way I saw it, there were two possibilities.

The first, of course, was that she was bonkers, which would explain both the dress and the roommate, birds of the feather and so on.

The second was that she really was an actual princess, perhaps of some smaller monarchy that I had never heard of. This felt improbable to me, because why would she be here?

I swallowed, and took a drink of water, trying to extend my thought process as long as possible. Finally, I asked what I figured was the only logical question.

“So, where’s your kingdom?”

“Well, it’s not my kingdom.”

“Okay, your father’s kingdom, then.”

“He’s not a king, as far as I know,” she said.

“Then – your mother. Her kingdom. Or queendom, if you like.”

Jennifer smiled. “My mother’s not a queen. She’s a witch.”

I smiled back. “You don’t have to watch your mouth around me. I’m an adult. I’ve heard the ‘b’ word before.”

Her smile faltered a bit. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Well, you just said your mother is a witch.”

“She is a witch.”

I felt like I had finally found my bearings. “You mean, she’s an actual witch.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And she, what, performs spells, and puts curses on people?”

“Sometimes.”

“And she flies around on a broomstick, and everything?”

“Well, that’s what witches do, isn’t it?” she said, with a perplexed look on her face.

“Of course it is,” I replied. “Everyone knows that.”

Our food arrived, and our talk turned to how good the pasta was, how fresh the bread was, and the fact that the meatball recipe was one from “the old country.”

I talked a little about my work (sales) and a little about her hobbies (“I collect unicorns.”) and an hour later the plates were cleared and the evening had been pleasant enough. I paid the bill, and tipped well, which is what you do when your date is in a ball gown and tiara and it isn’t prom night.

Back in the car, Jennifer turned to me. “It’s still pretty early,” she said.

It was a little after nine on a Friday night. Bars were open, movies were running, and if I was willing to drop fifty cents on a newspaper, I could probably find half a dozen things to do in the city.

Instead, I finally managed to squeeze out a lie. “I have to work tomorrow, sorry. It was a last-minute thing.”

“Oh, well, that’s too bad,” she said. “I had a really nice time tonight. We should get together again.”

“Sure,” I said. Lie number two. I was on a roll.

I drove her home, walked her up to her apartment, and pecked her on the cheek.

“I’ll call you.” Lie number three. I was outta there.

It’s true that it’s tough to meet a nice girl. The saying goes that there are three predominant traits in women – smart, beautiful, and sane, and you only get to pick two. With Jennifer, I was pretty sure I was going to get one and a half at best, if you combined the traits in some odd mathematical way.

I went home and “lost” her phone number.

***

Nearly a month had passed since my date with the princess, and since I had shared the story with most of my friends in the first week, I had all but forgotten about her.

I was sitting in my apartment flipping through the channels when my phone rang.

I picked it up. “Hello?”

“Why didn’t you call Jennifer?”

“Mom, I don’t think…”

“This is not your mother. This is Jennifer’s fairy godmother. Now, answer my question.”

“Look, lady. First of all, it’s none of your business whether I called Jennifer or not. She’s a grown woman and…”

“It certainly is my business. Do you know that she’s been crying for the last four weeks? Do you know how hard it is to get tears and snot out of a gown?”

“She wears that thing all the time?” It was out of my mouth before I could stop it.

“Jennifer owns several gowns. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Well, can’t you just, what, magic the stains out, or something?”

“Magic doesn’t work that way.”

“Well, then who washes those things? Magical mice?”

“We take them to the dry cleaners.” The edge on her voice sharpened even farther.

I desperately wanted to meet the man who washed those gowns, week in and week out, and never asked questions. I wanted to ask if, perhaps, the magical ball gown cleaning mice worked at the dry cleaners, or if, perhaps, they used magical lobsters.

What I said was, “I understand that you care about Jennifer very much. However, who I date and who I do not date is none of your concern. I’m sorry that I didn’t hit it off with her, but I’m sure she’ll find a nice man who adores all of her eccentricities. I’m going to hang up now, and if you call me back, I will hang up again and call the police.”

As I began to pull the phone away from my ear, I heard this: “Do you remember what I said to you, just before you and Jennifer went out?”

I wracked my brain for a moment. “You said… you said that you would turn me into a toad. If I hurt her.”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“I would like to point out to you that I didn’t hurt her.”

“I have several soiled gowns that say otherwise.”

Now, I admit, I can be a little shortsighted, but I’m not heartless. Despite the fact that everyone surrounding Jennifer was clearly a noodle salad short of a buffet, she didn’t seem to be a bad person, and I couldn’t help but feel that, perhaps, unlike most of the women I’ve dated, she wasn’t used to not having men call back.

“Do you want me to tell her that it isn’t going to work out?” I asked. “I wasn’t trying to hurt her, it’s just that most women…”

“Jennifer is not most women. She is a princess. She is used to being treated in a certain manner.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “But I can tell her that we won’t be going out again, if that’ll help.”

“I don’t want you to tell her you won’t be going out again,” said the Fairy Godmother. “I want you to tell her when your next date is going to be.”

“It’s going to be on the fifth of never,” I replied, not unkindly. “I’m sorry, but I’m just not interested, and unless you want me to tell her personally, this conversation really is over.”

I want you to understand something. I want you, the person reading this, to realize that up until this moment, I thought I was dealing with people who had, for one reason or another, just opted to live in their own reality.

What I mean is this:

On the other end of the line, I heard words being mumbled.

I said, “Excuse me?”

But it sounded like: “Eth-cuthe Muh?”

My tongue was hanging halfway down my torso.

I gasped, and choked back a scream as I tried to push my tongue back in my mouth with my free hand, while saying something that sounded like, “Wha dith oo thoo? What dith oo thoo?”

Abruptly, my tongue shrank, vanishing into my mouth. It was like having a tongue cramp while someone shoved an ice pick through my tongue at the exact same moment.

“I’m going to give you one minute, to let your tongue stop hurting,” I heard, through my ringing ears. “Then I want to hear this phone ring, and I want Jennifer to answer it, and you’re going to set your next date.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I hung up. A minute later, I was dialing.

***

They say that time flies when you’re having fun, but I find it even more true that days take forever and months take no time at all.

I spent the first three months that Jennifer and I were dating visiting every local (and not-so-local) library, trying to find information on magic and fairy tales. Ultimately, what I learned was this:

Authors are totally full of it.

They all contradict each other, the old fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm kind of cleaned up the old folk tales and made them somewhat consistent, yes, but everyone after and before them? The details in their stories varied in every possible way, simply because the nature of such stories is that you add your own details and subtract your own details as need be.

As for magic, well, that should be obvious. Just your basic illusion type stuff, none of it real.

Even research into the occult didn’t get me very far. I met a few people who claimed to be psychic and a few others who claimed to be, if not magical, then at least telekinetic.

But, of course, the minute I told them about the fact that I was dealing with a fairy godmother, a witch-no-not-a-Wiccan-yes-on-a-broomstick, and a woman who wore gowns and tiaras all day, well, they all recommended nice doctors to me, when they weren’t kicking me out for trying to make them look foolish.

Eventually, I gave up the search for a way out of my predicament.

Months turned into a year.

I found out that Jennifer really was a nice person, and really was quite dull, because she had no interest in anything but being a princess, which seems to involve mostly having nice gowns and beautiful furniture.

And her unicorn collection. Which was made up of real unicorns. Which you can’t ride, because they hate being captive, and will gore you on sight.

Somewhere in there, a marriage proposal happened (all resistance was eliminated when I briefly developed toe webbing), which put my mother over the moon with happiness. Metaphorically.

***

My wedding day, by the way? Pretty much where this story ends. They put me in a ridiculous outfit (fit for a prince, I was told) and made me memorize a really elaborate ceremony, much of it featuring arcane language that I didn’t much understand.

I got through it well enough to end up married, and it was at the banquet that things took an odd turn.

Somehow, my mother-in-law, and my fairy godmother-in-law, had secured an actual castle for the wedding banquet.

In the middle of the best man’s speech (I had begged him not to make jokes about a fairy-tale ending) the doors of the hall suddenly crashed open.

In the doorway was the largest horse I’ve ever seen, and on top of that horse was… well… a man. A very tall man, with salt-and-pepper hair, and a goatee, and did I mention that fact that he was wearing a suit of armor?

And carrying a massive sword?

And then, it happened – the moment that totally changed my life.

What I mean is this:

This all happened at the same time.

Jennifer’s mom stood up.

My mom stood up.

Jennifer’s mom yelled out, “Lance!”

My mom yelled out, “Lance!”

Jennifer’s mom turned to the head table, and said, “Jennifer, that’s your father!”

My mom turned to the head table, and yelled out, “Artie, that’s your father.”

Jennifer’s face crumpled, and she started to bawl.

My eyes got very wide, and I thanked everything that was good that I had never been more intimate with my sister than a chaste peck on the cheek.

And then there was a flash of light.

***

Flies, by the way? Not so bad. High in protein.

Forgotten Prince: Great Albums After Sign O' the Times

A couple of weeks ago some social media platform or another tossed me a video in which a person I didn’t know stated their unpopular opinions.

Granted, sometimes these kinds of things can be fun, since they amount to “this thing everyone likes I don’t” or “this thing no one likes I do,” both of which can be amusing to ponder, assuming they have a entertaining reasoning.

But one of his guy’s unpopular opinions hit a weird hot button with me – Prince didn’t release a great album after Sign O’ the Times.

Okay.

Right off, I gotta admit that I’ve had this weird… thing… with Prince that started with his death. When he passed, I made a massive blog that laid out how I’d spent years picking up every new release, often against my better judgement, and ending up at least somewhat disappointed in the results.

And yet…

Here’s the important thing – I don’t get hipster-y about many things, but I do get that way about Prince, and it relates back to those first moments after he died.

What I saw was a lot of people saying they loved him, when… they really loved Purple Rain. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it felt very limiting to me – the man released 39 albums, and you’re in love with the one that sold 10 million copies.

And then, there were the people who said they loved Prince for more than just Purple Rain… and then universally said they loved Around the World in a Day, which came out just after Purple Rain. And to be honest, a lot of people bought it because they loved Purple Rain, and a lot of people didn’t like it, but some people learned to…

And that’s cool, I suppose, but it still told me that they probably stopped listening to Prince after the year 1999 came and went.

(And mostly, they gave up after he left Warner Bros., which was 5 years before that.)

So.

I think what stuck in my craw about the Sign O’ the Times comment was the fact that after it came out, Prince had almost a decade of hits that pointed towards albums that ranged from good to great. It was only in about the mid-nineties that he fell off the radar, after The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, which somehow managed to be a huge hit and kind of disliked at the same time.

And I am willing to confess, after Prince left Warner Bros., the great albums get thinner. Freedom was great for Prince, in that he got to do whatever he wanted. It was also bad, in that he got to do whatever he wanted, which means that he was able to do things like release an album with 4 instrumental jams, each 14 minutes long.

But you know what? For some people, that’s their favorite record.

So maybe it was worth it.

As for me, I’m just going to rattle off the great albums that are straight up the middle – if you liked Purple Rain, and enjoy Prince in “hits” mode, these are great albums.

Although, first: A word on great albums. I’m going to define great here as “75% great songs and no bad songs.” Is that fair?

I say yes, based on:

Thriller is, most days, the biggest seller of all time. It also contains The Girl is Mine, a song many people loathe, and The Lady in My Life, a song many people can’t recall. (I suspect people stop listening after PYT.)

Even Sign O’ the Times contains It, a song that feels less like a song and more like a riff with some quickly improvised lyrics over the top of it.

So, with that mind, here are some great post Sign O’ the Times records:

Graffiti Bridge: Technically a soundtrack with a handful of songs performed by other artists, Prince still wrote all the songs, many of which are unheard gems. Still Would Stand All Time and The Question of U in particular are incredible.

Love Symbol: This one got lost in the whole “Prince changed his name!” controversy and a storyline that takes some of the focus off the music, but… the music is almost all fabulous, only 3 Chains O’ Gold taking up more time than it probably should.

Come: The opening track (and the closing one, which pairs with it in some ways) might keep some people who prefer a cleaner Prince away, but this is a fairly quiet, sometimes dark and occasionally experimental record that, honestly, doesn’t contain any bad songs.

The Gold Experience: This one deserved a harder push from label and, frankly, a better single. Instead, they chose Dolphin, which is lovely but doesn’t hold a candle to almost every other song on the record. There’s an alternate universe where Now or Endorphinemachine hit radio first and this one is remembered as an all-time great, and instead it’s forgotten. And unfortunately, after this, there are some much larger gaps between greatness.

3121: There’s a whole decade between The Gold Experience and 3121, and the truth is what’s in the middle isn’t all bad. Most of it is good, and some of it is great, but it isn’t great all the way through – of the hours of released material, there’s something like 90-120 minutes that would build an all-time-great Spotify playlist. But if you want a great record, 3121 is the next one on the list, and while critics seemed to love claiming that one record or another was a “return to form” – this one felt the closest.

Art Official Age: Prince released this album on the same day he released a totally different record with a brand-new band, but this one felt like he knew he wanted to keep pushing himself. A lot of artists get to a certain age and you can see them looking back. Johnny Cash, Elton John, and others get into their later years and decide to try to recreate what made them great. Prince kept trying to push forward.

Solving the Pennywise Problem

 I recently managed to see the long-in-the-making documentary Pennywise: The Story of IT, which covers the creation of the 90s TV miniseries. I won’t say that the documentary is the kind of thing that changes lives, but if you were a fan of the adaptation at all its well worth your time. They managed to track down and interview just about everyone involved who’s still alive and kicking.

Moreover, likely since the series is pretty far in the past, people are up for talking about the flaws, including some of the weirdness in the source material, the mechanical spider, and most interesting to me, the fact that part 2 isn’t as good as part 1.

Why does this interest me so much? Because as you likely know, the book was adapted again a few years ago, this time for the big screen, and once again, audiences felt that the second part wasn’t as strong as the first.

And here’s what surprises me: While there are various discussions about what makes part 2 weaker than part 1, none of them quite gets into why that is. Or potentially, how to fix it when it gets adapted again twenty years from now.

(It could happen.)

So.

To explain the problem, we first have to get into the plot of the movies, and how they’re the same.

In the 90s version, we get a direct adaptation of the opening of the book, namely the little brother and his paper boat meet Pennywise, and the brother gets eaten. We then meet the adults (briefly) and spend the rest of part 1 meeting the kids, watching them become friends, fight a bully, and then fight and defeat Pennywise.

In part 2 of the 90s version, we see the adults get together at a Chinese restaurant, do some mostly totally unmemorable stuff (fixing up a bike!), fighting the same bully because Pennywise sent the bully to take out the now-adults, and then the team fights and defeats Pennywise again.

In the 2010s version, part 1 has almost the exact same opening, and then… all the adult stuff is skipped, and it’s just the kids becoming friends, fighting a bully and defeating Pennywise.

In part 2, the adults get called back, meet at a Chinese restaurant, try to find some totems, fight off the bully, and then fight and defeat Pennywise again.

Okay: Ready for the problem?

And, sadly, the fix that no one is likely to use?

That’s not how the plot of the book rolls out.

Here’s what happens in the book.

The paper boat sequence occurs. We then get about 150 pages or so of the adults getting a call to go back to fight Pennywise, and in the 20 pages or so each of them gets, we learn who they are as adults, where they have been successful and unsuccessful, and get little hints about who they were as kids.

Then the flashbacks start.

As the book progresses, the adults gather and talk about their shared history, resulting in many, many, many flashbacks while the adults mostly sit around and don’t do very much at all. From time to time, Pennywise throws a scare at them, but, to put it bluntly, 80% of the interesting and memorable stuff happens to the kids.

Even the major obstacles Pennywise throws at the non-adults don’t veer the plot all that much until the book is very near it’s end. Bill and Beverly each have a spouse track them to Derry, but they affect the plot so little that Beverly’s partner is dropped from both adaptations completely.

And here’s the thing that’s really important: In the book, because so much of it is in flashback, Pennywise is defeated twice, essentially back-to-back. First in the past, and then in the present.

Why does this matter?

Simply put, the adaptation doesn’t work because, in both cases, all the meat of the story is told in part 1. Part 2 could, essentially, be a 30-45 minute wraparound story for part 1. It can’t work on it’s own because that’s not what it was designed for.

Both movies attempt to fix this by adding in fresh material, but it’s clear they knew that they were in trouble. The 90s version is in luck because it only has to fill about 90 minutes, which means they can just stretch what little material they have from the book and make it work, just not super well.

The 2010s version, however, attempts to add material, and frankly, it feels tacked on. The scavenger hunt is kneecapped by the fact that one character is already out of the movie and therefore can’t hunt, which makes the obvious even to non-readers that this was just crammed in there.

So, what’s the solution?

Well, I’m not the kind of person to take movies and re-edit them, because I lack the time and much of the equipment. I’ll leave that to the people with those skills.

But I can say what they need to do in the future, which is: Follow the book, and put both climaxes at the end.

Now, this isn’t the kind of thing that movie studios really want to do, frankly. Putting a cap on the first movie meant there didn’t have a be a second one. It was kind of brilliant.

But it killed the second movie.

Today, we will, at times, see studios willing to effectively put out half a movie. And with IT, I feel like you could get a double win, by putting out part 1 in summer and part 2 around Christmas.

Or, you know, take it back to TV with the streaming world, and make a 12-episode series that a) remembers Bev has a husband and b) adapts all the historical stories that never make into any of the adaptations because they’re entertaining, but not essential.

There’s a saying in writing about killing your darlings and for filmmakers the darling that needs to be killed is the neat, tidy ending that happens in the middle of the story – because even at over 1000 pages King there’s not enough material for a bow to be there.

And I’ll be honest: No one’s going to read this and hire me, because when they remake this, they know that first part is bulletproof.

So, with that in mind: Good luck to whoever is hired to write part 2. Your part is destined to be disappointing. But it doesn’t have to be. Just find one of the (many!) great set pieces and let it end part 1, and part 2 will take care of itself.

Giving Up Sleep for Your Dreams

 I had a few people wander across my timeline recently talking about “going hard at what you love for a year” and while the discourse was respectful, I was amazed at how it also left out so many factors. Moreover, there’s a whole subculture of side hustles and “if you’re doing what you love you’ll be successful” that I think is, frankly, the result of a US culture of “you can accomplish anything if you just work hard enough, and if you didn’t get it that’s your fault.”

Which means I’m going to babble about this, because I’ve gone this “go hard” route three different times, none of them went where they “should” have gone, but there is some learning to be had.

So, first time: Screenwriting. I had gotten into screenplays and film in general in college and decided I wanted to a) try writing movies and then b) seeing what I could do after I wrote them. At the time I did not have any connections, I was starting from zero.

I wrote some garbage screenplays, then a couple of good ones, then I got online and started researching small production companies that were looking to make movies. (You have to understand, in the early 2000s this was A Thing. A lot of no-name filmmakers would make a tiny film for no money, studios would be impressed, and then suddenly no-name filmmakers were getting studio gigs. At least, so the legends went. Reality was more complicated. It always is.)

Essentially, I lived two lives: Work my regular job. Home, eat, a little time with wife, then write and research selling opportunities until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I did this for something like two years, because although I kept inching forward, I never made The Big Leap where I sold a script to Hollywood and started getting meetings and got a good agent and so on.

I did get one feature made, a couple of short films made and got a few options and yes, I did make some money but if I took out all my learning time and ONLY factored in my professional accomplishments, when I did my taxes every year my “business” lost money. And I was not pulling fancy tax footwork.

When your “hobby” becomes a job there reaches a point where the fun of it starts to leak out and it needs to stop costing you money and start making you money, and eventually I realized making less than a dollar an hour for my time when I could have been spending time with friends and family or engaging in OTHER hobbies or, you know, sleeping were better ways to spend my time.

I did take on other projects over the years but my rule was that they either had to have SOME money involved or they HAD to get made. I broke this rule a few times and got burned every time—the low-budget concept that just needed a script flamed out the minute there were words on a page because other people had “a vision” but realized the workload was insurmountable. I’m not mad about it, but I do wish I could have that time back.

I would go back to screenwriting in a heartbeat if there was money in it—even a little bit. I really did enjoy it. But screenplays that don’t become movies are, sadly, pretty useless unless . It’s better to write it as a novel, which you can always sell yourself.

Which brings me to going hard: Number 2. Amazon made it possible to sell Kindle books at basically no cost to you, as long as you were willing to put it the effort of formatting and cover design yourself. So I went hard at books for something like 18 months, writing, getting covers, formatting, marketing and also trying to break into traditional publishing. And I got almost nowhere.

My series got picked up by a small publisher for a couple of years and that was a genuine miracle, because I was unemployed during a lot of that time (part of the big economic crash) and the money the book earned through the publisher covered some bills that needed covering.

But again, at the end I was burned. Out. The money was nice, but it wasn’t replacing having a job, at all. It wasn’t even close. And I had a young child. Having two jobs—and then having to search for a job while also trying to write—just wore me down.

Do I still want to write books? Sometimes. But going back to querying, or trying to market my own stuff again? Again: It’s like having two full time jobs. And working 80 hours a week, to possibly lose money? It almost makes more sense to get a part time job and sock away $100 a week into a Roth IRA.)

(That said: I have an idea that might be good enough to sell on the title alone, which never happens to be.  But piling up all those words?)

Finally, there was the time I decided to go hard and become a full-time freelance writer. There was a LOT of luck in this choice. I was unemployed (though searching for work really is a full-time job) and I had one freelance opportunity suddenly need much more writing, and a second, well-paying opportunity appear out of nowhere.

This lasted just a handful of months before it all came crashing down. My clients had budget issues and rather than, say, asking if they could cut my fees, told me they would call me when they needed me. That didn’t happen. I tried to find other clients, but nothing came of it.

And honestly, I had made major concessions to be a “full-time writer.” I wasn’t making anything close, money-wise, to what I had been making at my previous job. And I was putting in a lot more hours. And the number of times I came up with a fair price for my work, then watched it get cut in half (or sometimes way less than half) just to keep writing…

On top of that, when you’re freelancing, you’re often taking their directive and running with it. If they need a story on used cars, well, that’s what you’re writing…

And from all of this… came two big lessons.

To be clear, when going hard, I wasn’t the guy who abandoned by family and friends. I did not steal my time from their time. I stole it from my own, which mostly just made me tired all the time, since I was staying up way too late and getting up a little too early.

But the two lessons I learned were mainly about luck.

I was luckier than some. I had a few indie movies made from my scripts. Some people write for decades and never even get that.

I got to freelance write as my actual job, even it was short-lived. Very few people can say that.

And I had a bestselling Kindle novel and sold thousands of books. Again, not many people can say these things.

But each ladder of success has a gap, and getting across it, to the land where your hobby becomes your actual job for years, decades, or a lifetime? That’s just blind luck. The right project in the right hands at the right time.

And that didn’t happen.

Collectively, I spent somewhere between five and six years going full-tilt, and today… I still have a day job. Because I need money. And insurance. And assurance that I’m not going to watch my savings drain while I wait to sell something else.

On the other side of the equation: Sometimes going hard for a few years can have real benefits. The people getting a new degree, for example, or learning a new, practical skill. All the writing I did has gotten me into other, much more steady, writing opportunities.

So was it all worth it?

In my case, maybe. I basically gave myself a variety of college courses on different types of writing, and made a little money doing it. And at this point, I’ve been writing professionally for more than 20 years, and had some form of writing be the ONLY thing I’m doing for work for more than 10.

But my suspicion is that if I kept my writing to an hour or two a night I might still be writing screenplays, or novels, or articles, or something, and not have burned out. Moreover, if I had done the slow-and-steady thing, I might have accomplished at least a few of the projects I’ve started in the last 10 years instead of abandoning them because I wasn’t able to make the pages pile up as quickly as in the old days.

Gilmore Girls: The Final Four

Endings are tricky.

As a writer who has written The End on a number of scripts and novels, I recognize this.

As a viewer, I’ve come to realize that sometimes perfect endings sometimes don’t have a whole lot to do with the middle.

Vampire Diaries ended this year, and while the final season had its up and downs, the last two thirds of the final episode came together perfectly.  If you’d been watching the show since day one, it was essentially 40 minutes of ugly crying, minus the commercials.

Which brings me around to Gilmore Girls.

Which… let’s just say things got complicated.

If you’re a fan of Gilmore Girls, you know the story already, but if not, in brief.  The show had a very particular creator, who finessed every word of every script, even if she didn’t take a writing credit.  Amy Sherman-Palladino was Gilmore Girls and Gilmore Girls was her.

The show ran for six seasons, and then Amy got into an argument about the show with Warner Brothers, and then she was off the show.  I’m not going to go into he-said/she-said on this one, because it wasn’t really all that important.

Ultimately, the show carried on for another season, starring all the same people but written NOT by Amy Sherman-Palladino, and while some fans hated it, I still don’t feel it was that much off-brand from the original flavor.  The show had an odd problem where the first time an established character showed up they would feel a little off – not written quite right – but by the next episode the kinks were worked out and the show was cruising along just fine.

And it all came together nicely in the last episode – even people who didn’t care for season seven will often cop to the act that the show ended more or less perfectly. 

But!  Here’s where it gets weird.

Amy Sherman-Palladino had said she always knew the last four words of the show, and she was not shy about reminding people about this over the years.

In a world without Netflix and streaming and shows long thought concluded suddenly coming back, I was kind of hoping that Amy would include that final exchange in her memoirs, or maybe in some interview or another 20 years after the show concluded.

Instead, she got four movie-long episodes to end the show the way she wanted to end the show.

And as it turns out…

Well, okay, I’ll talk about the four words in a second, and I’ll be honest.  I was happy the show was coming back, but only to a certain extent.  I seem to be the only one that noticed, but a LOT of cult TV has been returning in various forms and formats these last ten or fifteen years, and so far?

No one has been happy.

The return of Arrested Development?  Fans just thought it was okay.

Firefly, Buffy, and Angel back in comic book form?  Somewhere between “good” and “awful,” with almost no one thinking it was great.

The Veronica Mars movie?  Well, okay, that one I really liked, along with the first book.  The second one, however, went way off the rails in the last thirty pages or so.

If I’m being truthful, I can’t think of a single reboot or return that’s really been embraced, even by the most ardent fans.  The new MST3K episodes seem to be coming closest to hitting the mark.  Doctor Who went from being a well-loved cult show to being an actual hit.

In both those cases, come to think of it, the return of the show brought almost an entirely new cast and let them do their own thing.  That may be the difference.

So I sat down to watch 4 90 minute episodes of Gilmore.  I was already a little behind, as I was off visiting family over Thanksgiving weekend and binge-watching was out of the question.

Shortly thereafter, I sat down to watch the new Amy Sherman-Palladino created season, and…  my wife hated it.  Hated.  It.

I didn’t agree, but I saw her point.  Rory had started off as smart and funny and loveable on the show, and then gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, mostly due to the character of Logan.

Every TV show, if it’s on long enough, will have one terrible character, and Logan was it on Gilmore.  He could sometimes be funny, and the actor was fine, but his character arc was mostly that he was reach and that he found Rory attractive.  He made problems vanish with a money hose, and honestly, when he and Rory broke up, I was happy that he was gone.

Except now he’s back, and he somehow manages to be worse, because he still makes problems vanish with a money hose, but he’s also having a thing with Rory despite the fact that he’s engage for literally the entire series.

And that never stops.  He just cheats relentlessly on his fiancé and there’s never a moment where he realizes that’s wrong.  Instead, he sprays his money hose, and then sprays it more, and instead of growing or changing or realizing he’s giving up what he actually wants, his story just kind of ends because Rory steps out of it.

And Rory breaking up with him, or at least pretending to, is pretty much her only character growth, and honestly, it’s a super, super, super low bar.  She spends the entire new series looking for a job, eventually getting a non-paying job as the editor of the town paper.  She keeps claiming that she’s broke and couch-surfing, but she spends most of the series hopping on planes and flying across the ocean on a whim.

I suppose we can assume that’s Logan’s money hose?  Maybe?  But it’s never addressed.

As for Lorelai, she spends the entire time trying to do… something?  Actually, she doesn’t really do anything.  She’s living with Luke, and her inn is too small, and she doesn’t really want to change any of that, until she does, and then they get married and she plans on buying a larger inn.

And I suppose it’s worth talking about Emily, who spends three episodes walking around in a daze trying to figure out what to do now that her husband has passed away.  She comes off the best, I think, simply because she exhibits actual growth, and I shudder to think what her storyline would have been had the actor who plays her husband not passed away.

But like I said, this is about endings.

Talking about The Vampire Diaries, I had to cop to the last 40 minutes of the final episode being great, but the season before it being weak.

And this “season” of the Gilmore Girls suffers in nearly the exact same way.

I don’t know that I agree totally with my wife, as I thought there was some funny stuff in the first episode.  It works, mostly, because it signals the return of the town that you know and love, and you can kind of tolerate Rory being awful.

But then it just keeps going in that vein for two more episodes.  Rory is lost, and doesn’t know what to do until her ex-boyfriend tells her to write a book.

Lorelai somehow manages to fill her life with drama even though she actually has everything she ever wanted.  As a parent, I could see where she might be worried about her kid being adrift so late in life, but her drama feels manufactured in order to get to a happy ending.

But again: The show can be funny.  There’s a segment about Stars Hollow: The Musical, that is totally worth the twenty minute detour.  The rhythms of the show   don’t crackle as perfectly as they once did, but they get close a few times.

And so ultimately, it all hinges on the final episode.

The truth is: It isn’t a perfect ninety minutes.  Because first they have to play out all the silliness from the last three episodes.

But once the throat is cleared, the show finally, finally, finally offers up all the feels it should have been offering from the word go.

Lorelai and her mom finally reconcile, in a monologue that’s perfectly written and perfectly executed.  Emily finally figures out how to move on from the death of her husband.  There’s a big wedding, the one that should have happened years ago, and Amy Sherman-Palladino proves that she really does know how to bring all the feels.

And then those final four words.

And the big reveal?

Well, I joked before the revival ever hit Netflix that the final four words would be, “Let’s call her Lorelai,” my implication being that Rory was pregnant, it was a girl, and yeah, they would name it after her mother and herself.

And I nailed it.  Go, me.

Actually, she just said “I’m pregnant,” and I guess to some extent I understand was Amy Sherman-Palladino was going for.  It takes the series more or less full-circle, as it has always been about moms and daughters.

What does it really mean, though?

It means that Rory’s storyline comes and goes in the same way: She went from being a little wunderkind with love and goodness in her heart to being terrible, and then she stays terrible.

Lorelai at least has an arch, where she starts off unsure and confused and then makes some decisions that I guess are good.  And we got some nice speeches and a good cry out of it, so there’s that.

And man, but Emily was perfect.  Everything about it was perfect. 

There’s been some yammering about bringing the Girls back for another go-around, since the end of the show actually sounds like a bit of a cliffhanger, and I’ll admit if it happens I’ll watch it.  A lot of the pointless angst of the show has been cleared out now, and they could actually move forward and make the show more like it was in the beginning – fun people bouncing off each other.

In the end, I remain torn about the return of the show.  Of the six hours, I probably only really loved 90-100 minutes, and not all of that was from the same episodes.  With a little work, the whole thing could have been a lovely 2 hour movie that wrapped up what needed to be wrapped up, gave us the final four words, and sent the series out on a high note.

As it is, I expect that in the future, people will mostly debate about whether the seventh season of the show was the worst, or the eighth.

Am I glad I saw it?  Sure.  I got the closure I wanted, though the mystery of the ending was ruined by the internet before I could find the time to see it for myself.

And yeah, I did get emotional in the final hour, so there’s that.

So, thanks everyone for coming back and saying goodbye.

But one return was plenty.