sat Ja 19 the plays the thing, Act II

Well, I tried to describe the script of the SS to Connie and her teacher friend who were there for Mrs. Jan Fischer who was directing. Her hub is the one with the book, "When the Mob Ran Las Vegas."

I haven't heard much from these folks lately.

I also mentioned why I was stepping out of the writer's group, i.e. the frowning pressure not to have anything sexual, how Dan had blocked his out with a tool and that if someone wanted to read it, why, they could open up that tool.

This is direct ref to Mirna, I know, her library frown her mean scating screed....you can see there's alot of anger in the writing and not a little loneliness and sorrow.

I can't seem to stay on subject--how I ran into teacher Connie Mills and her buddy. And how I subbed for them. Each one of them. Sometimes I'd drop off a published essay to Connie. And she had intro to me to her son via e in Chicago, that he worked for Barnes & Noble and thus an avenue for any publishing venues.

Ventures?

Adventures?

I pitched an e and of course I never got a response.

Connie was looking on a little wrinkled side. The other teacher was lamenting that she has 28 kids in her speech class and that it was taking forever.

At any rate, Connie was turned away from me. I didn't think she was listening. But then, when I started talking about my latest ss, she turned her head and began to address me and describe something she'd just read. Train Spotters. This can't be the title because I asked her the name again when she was leaving for the intermission. Train spotters, she said. No, that's not the title. It didn't show up. But seemed to be similar to what I'd written.

I tried to describe it to them: an old farm hand coming back from the dead from the Cotton Mill or something like that and then about Jeremy and then about the ministry and then sitting down for a Father's Day meal because...well actually, I tried to frame the discussion with "You know how you almost have a near death experience and you try to recapture that last day before?" And so this ss was a description of the day before, it was bigger than both of us. How I was working iron and then helping my dad on the farm and how I went out and drove the tractor.

They thought it sounded like it was a novel, rather than a short story. And I said yes, it is 60 pages long but I put it in two parts.

And then a little bit about the writing group and they pooed pooed the silly notion. And then I tried to describe the continuum...some just starting out, some having been at it awhile. But I couldn't interject that the man who runs it has no college degree or knows the slightest thing about literature and writing (ask him what books he's read, go ahead ask him. No Kerouac, Vonnegut, Mailer; not a word of Thompson or Burroughs or Ginsberg. But his own surfeit of books, I guess, Clancy and the pop fiction market. Wrote computer manuals and then, one day, he shrugged his shoulders and decided he was going to be a writer)

Gee, the guy can't write. The one gal that calls herself the plains writer, not too bad. And Walt, the teacher from Bago. A new member posted.

I'm still not getting to the fact that there was that moment of driving the tractor, how that's what I wanted to do with James Jeremy but instead it was the guy that fell down the stairs, Harald, and who didn't have a chance.

Have you ever heard of Pat Robertson? This would be some explanation to Harald Bredensen. Who was the Our Father.

No, Joanie, heading for Nicaragua, to teach English, had only read a couple pages.

"Really," she said, when I told her it had gotten positive notice. And then Kath interjected about e from Dan Ross. "Really," she said.

Connie said, imagining me coming to school with a ss, "I'm not going to edit it for you." As if I asked. As if she didn't know right off the bat that I was a great writer. And know, Connie, you haven't read my 911 piece from the paper.

But I didn't want to sound any more overbearing than I already was so didn't tell the number I'd published this year but did tell Joanie how I thought I'd have another one but it didn't go through.

So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.