“Congratulations!” read the automated email message. “You are now friends with Skyla!”

Well, that IS good news, since I think Skyla is awesome, although I don’t actually know her. She was the art director/majordomo on the Nothing But Red project, to which I was a contributor. This email came from Goodreads, which my sister urged me to join, so that we could see what we were reading. Sadly, I read slowly these days, my commute time clogged by podcasts (This American Life, Planet Money, learnfrenchbypodcast.com, The Moth) and my “leisure reading time” seems to be focused on other people’s blogs, including Head Butler, which always succeeds in making me feel ignorant, out of it, and poorly read.

So, I am slow on Goodreads, although I have rather quickly garnered five friends! My sister, of course, who initially invited me, and my best friend’s teenage daughter (hola, Carmen!) who just graduated from high school (congrats, Carmen!) and her best friend, Malyssa (congrats, Malyssa!) who I have met only once, and my friend Paul, who is a Scot and has a reading list heavily dominated by Scottish writers, and now Skyla Dawn Cameron. Skyla lives in southern Ontario, and as a child I used to visit southern Ontario in the summer, as my grandmother Gigi had a cottage there (in Grand Bend, Skyla) but otherwise, we have little to base our friendship on, except for a love of reading. And vampires.

I am not on Facebook.

Odd. Though I can reveal to you all the painful intimacies of my teenage crush on Alex Logan (not his real name, BTW), I feel that Facebook is an invasion of privacy. And believe me, I have been pressured to join. I think, at least once a week.

I am on linkedin, where I enjoy a dual identity as those I am linkedin to are either law firm employees or actors. I rarely refuse an invitation to “link in” except when I am CONVINCED that they have the wrong Elizabeth Frank. Even then, I would accept their offer of friendship, or “linking in” except that this would lead to confusion and almost certain disappointment. I have been saddened on the few occasions when my invitation to “link” was not accepted – very few, and indeed, why? Once I have been “linked,” I do absolutely nothing about it. My profile is not complete; I am a cyber-schizo, with half my artistic life and half my dayjob life; I don’t know how to recommend people or ask for their recommendations. I just like to see the number go up. Friends!

posted by Elizabeth at 9:07 PM   1 Comments

A couple of months ago I finished my last screenplay, "Wildflowers of the West."

I wrote to an e-friend that after I put this script "through its paces in the marketplace," I would retire from writing screenplays.

For me -- unrepresented and lightly produced -- the "marketplace" consists of paid readers and contests. So, although I think this is the best script I have ever written, and does in fact represent the best I can do, there is scant chance that "Wildflowers" will ever see the light of day, or of film, even digital.

I wish I could report that this development was unfolding with a Zen-like bow of acceptance (and the concomitant re-direction of my energies to a greater purpose) or even a jaunty Katherine Hepburn shrug-and-stride away from the elusive object of desire, but I am more like the truculent adolescent, kicking at the dirt, wearing sweats and sneakers and attitude, exuding defiance but yearning to be told, "But you are pretty, you are."


Of course, the genuinely pretty are never soothed this way, and it is certainly never followed with brave advice, "Now, if only you'd wear a little more eye makeup ..."

I am reminded of my first serious-ass crush. It took place in junior high and the object of my desire was Alex Logan. Desire is the operative word here -- I had never felt anything like it. I had been enamored of pretty eyes or a graceful swoop of hair, but Alex was the first one I wanted to do things to, specific things, things I could picture and blush about. Olive-skinned, tawny, angry, haughty, Alex was North Kirkwood Junior High School's James Dean.

To say that Alex Logan was unaware of my existence would be such an understatement that I cannot even find a metaphor for it -- I had, at that stage, not even a taxonomy to assign myself to, it was junior high, so we had not yet divided ourselves into our interests -- inept sports (funny how athletes are worshipped without regard to their skill), orchestra, drama.

Anyway, I lusted. And I learned that Alex Logan was going out with Karen Carter.

This was a scandal! Karen Carter was a year older than Alex Logan. She was a freshman in high school! while Alex and I (Alex and I! sigh!) were eighth-graders.

Cut to: the flurry of calendar pages being torn away. High school over, college over, I am back in Kirkwood, engaged in patio cocktails on one of those long midwestern summer evenings in which the shift from day to night doesn't lower the temperature but merely changes the key.

A relative of mine is getting married and these are the bridesmaids and the bridal party flotsam, the chicks who were cheerleaders, or pom pom girls, or anything but brainy like -- honor roll, right? Writer award from the state or whatever? You always were serious. Where do you live now? New York? New York City? In the city? Kimmy Miller's cousin Brad went there, you know, the gay one, wasn't it a shame what happened to him ...

Karen Carter? No, she's not coming. She's away in Illinois at a funeral, I think it was her grandma, or a great aunt ...

"I used to be so jealous of Karen Carter," I voiced, with the courage of much group therapy. "Dating Alex Logan and all."

Pause, then exhalations into the already thick, already damp and laden, air. Despite their junior varsity triumphs, these bridal shower girls were, nearly to the man, chain-smokers and had learned from their mothers the art of the long smoky dragon-like exhalation of disappointment and disapproval.

"He used to beat the shit out of her," one of them said.

"Alex?" I was dumbfounded. "Karen?"

"Remember that trip to Cabo, she was so bruised she had to wear sunglasses the whole time," one bridesmaid said, hissing smoke. "I was up in first class and I went back to say hi and I like saw her all swelled up and everything and I'm, like, God, you're such an asshole."

"Karen?" I repeated. "Alex?"

But the bridesmaids and courtiers had moved on; my concerns were nothing. I was there on sufferance, after all. It was only my indisputable connection with the bride that kept me on that privileged midwestern patio. I had never handled a pom-pom, worse yet, I had forsaken Kirkwood for New York, so who cared about my crush on Alex Logan?

He used to beat the shit out of Karen Carter.

So wow, I thought, on that Missouri lawn, good thing I never got what I wanted.

But couldn't I have gotten it for just a little while?

posted by Elizabeth at 11:14 PM   0 Comments

I was worried about Spock. The actor, Zachary Quinto, scares me, not only because he plays Sylar on "Heroes" (so convincingly that I'm too nervous to watch week to week and have to wait until the season ends to watch the whole thing on DVD, so that the suspense doesn't damage me) but because he seems a bit chilly himself -- there's his name: Zachary Quinto, which sounds like something out of Nabokov, and the fact that in the photos from the movie's opening in Sydney, London and Los Angeles, he is never smiling.

I need not have worried about Spock: it is his movie. I read a review today that stated the opposite, that the movie was Kirk's. But I say no. Chris Pine is perfectly fine as young Kirk -- cocksure, cocky, impulsive, violent -- but the character is less interesting. He's a show off; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he struts around the campus of Starfleet Academy; he is publicly called out before the class; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he ... well, there's a pattern here. For all the pow! pow! pow! damage inflicted on him, it takes a lot to "get it through his thick skull" as a certain doctor, not an elevator, might say.

Spock, however, is a revelation. The smallest unfavorable observation bruises him, and as as an actor -- and a character -- he registers the hurt without any demonstrable display of it, in true Vulcan manner. He is conflicted, cautious, wounded, evolving and adjusting. And because of all this, way sexier than Kirk. And very witty.

The whole thing was terrific fun. Most of the younger incarnations worked for me -- dry Bones, excitable, blushing Chekhov, awestruck Scotty. Mr. Sulu, whose original role was to sit on the bridge and be Asian, got to display some grit and valor for a change. An ensign in a red shirt went on an away team, and those in the know can guess his fate.

Lt. Uhura has caused some controversy, but I don't care about the [I cannot reveal it] as much as I was bothered by seeing the character "upgraded" into the "Dr. Babe" phenomenon. That is, where women were once just babes in short skirts (see, Ensign Rand on the original Star Trek), now, due to those nagging nasty feminists, they are babes in short skirts with PhD's and exceptional language skills. We know they are smart not because they demonstrate it but because they announce it. I speak "all three dialects" of Romulan, sir. But they never get a piece of the action, except when they are the action.

Speaking of action, a bit too much of it for my liking -- I mean the video game kind, where spacecraft hurtle through tight spaces while things fire at them, or crash into a larger spacecraft, or SPECIAL EFFECTS, BLARING SOUND, INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC.

Give me a little snogging in the elevator any old time.

Edited 5/11/09 -- because it is Uhura, not Uhuru

posted by Elizabeth at 4:55 PM   1 Comments