"In my sex fantasy, nobody loves me for my brain"
--Nora Ephron.
My writing collaborator and I have discovered that the most common path to production for first-time playwrights is to enter sponsored drama competitions. Unfortunately, many of them like The Alliance Theater in Atlanta's
Kendeda Competition require that entrants be enrolled in a graduate playwriting program.
This is not an option for us. We have seven children between us, not to mention a stack of superfluous diplomas. My colleague has an MBA, CPA, cooking school diploma and divemaster certification. Ironically, the latter two degrees have proven the most useful in our writing adventures. As for me, no more diplomas, thank-you-very-much. Graduating from Wellesley College Phi Beta Kappa, with an Honors degree in English literature couldn't even get me an $18,000 a year publishing job in New York back in 1994. My Universite de Paris DEA (Masters) in Comparative Literature was worse than having no graduate degree at all. This testimony of impracticality was guaranteed to send would-be employers packing.
I suppose none of this would matter if I were a clever, resourceful sort of girl.... In my most recent employment experience as the Director of Communications for JBoss, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince journalists to write about us and paying talented full time PR to do just this. It never occurred to me that I could skip that superfluous step by simply pretending
to be a journalist. Not only would I have saved money, I would have done away with the inconvenience of relying on two
credible sources for my stories. In a crazy mixed up world where
legitimate journalists pretend to be anonymous bloggers, I missed the boat on
corporate PR pretending to be disinterested journalists.
Ironically, it was my old Wellesley tee-shirt that initiated a conversation about journalism with another mother, while we were waiting to pick up our kids at school. She, herself, had attended Barnard, and then Columbia School of Journalism. She mentioned that the loans for two years at the latter totalled more than her four years at Barnard. My wiser pseudo-journalist self certainly would have skipped that step. I could get more mileage out of a fake pair of tits. I came to this conclusion observing first-hand the successful interview tactics of a journalist from a respected business publication. Her plunging decollete exerted a
Kaa-like effect on her interviewees--"Don't think about the questions, boys; just focus on
these." No doubt she had figured out the corresponding plunge in the heterosexual male IQ, transforming the heppest and smartest Web 2.0-types into
this.
Thankfully, my certificate of enrollment in a Masters program in the Fine Arts is being mailed to me, forewith. Not the
Yale School of Drama, but the Yell! (in the South, this is pronounced 'yay-ul') School of Drama, my distinguished soon-to-be alma-mater, a place that understands that the implication that I am anything less than talented flies squarely in face of the incipient dramatist I was born to be. And that for the $200 I am paying for my diploma, I am far too busy and important a person to be bothered with studying the techniques of playwriting or reading anybody that has mastered them.
