puddle girls 3

 I had thought that I had written that Puddle Girl story a year or two ago, but I discovered it was 2016.  A good rule for us oldsters is that when thinking back to something you did in the past come to your best estimate and then multiply it by two or three.  Actually it was written in two parts, the Kaufman Prairie Lake which is kind of arty, and then the rest that is more Robbinesque later, but now I am at an impasse.

For research I am reading Emma Goldman's autobiography which is a huge book.  I had thought somehow to work Emma Goldman into the story what with that movie being about her, but now that I am reading her story I feel a kinship with her and don't want to make fun of her, but if I am not making fun of everybody how can I write?

I am a little unnerved myself at how easy it was to write in the voice of a second grade girl.  I don't know what to say.

Those lino block things date to about 1992 when I had just moved into Marina City and was taking a non credit printmaking class at Harold Washington college.  I still have a box of a hundred or two of those 2x2 blocks carved with different patterns.  I would start out by putting down a background of maybe two layers of blocks in a predetermined grid, and then I would put down the cat, the steam engine, or the fish, over that.  It was a long process and by the time I was putting down the ink itself I felt more like a bricklayer than an artiste.

The foreground figure had to be composed of a triangular block stamped once into every square in the grid, but at a different angle and the only figures that I could fit into that mode were the cat, train, or fish.  I could, and probably will, explain this in more detail somewhere down the line.  Anyway after the fish I couldn't come up with any more figures and nobody in the class was very enthused about my work on these things and I drifted away from it.

The bar downstairs from my apartment in Austin Texas was not a very friendly place, certainly not to yet another Yankee who was coming down there to ruin their Lone Star paradise with Yankee crapola.  (Like enticing the Texas Chili Parlor to put beans in their chili which I am afraid happened on my watch), but they didn't seem all that friendly to each other either, they mostly just stared straight ahead and drank their beer and didn't say much of anything to anybody, it was like drinking was more of a job than an exercise in gemutlichkeit.

Anyway the day after New Years Eve there was a big steaming bowl of black-eyed peas which the regulars all urged me to partake of even though I was likely somehow responsible for the desecration of the chili parlor.  But the next day they were back to their taciturn ways and if I got any luck out of a couple New Years bowls of black-eyed peas I didn't notice it.

I don't know how good the fireworks were over in Ravenswood, but downtown they were spectacular.  Instead of just from Navy Pier they were shooting them off from the bridges over the river so they were exploding maybe a hundred feet from me, and at eye level, and they just went on and on.  I wish they could do it every night, but maybe at a more reasonable time.  It was a struggle staying up till then but once I had, fired up for the fireworks, I was up till four in the morning.

And here is the rest of The Puddle Girls:

Crappy movies, she was all blonde hair and mugging outrageously.  The critics panned the movies, but at the end of the reviews they always added, that Julia Janovsky, she had something.  I knew it too.

The depression hit, jobs were scarce, funding at the University dried up, the professorship which I should have gotten, I didn't.

But I had a way with words, that's what they said, I believed it too.  I could be adaptable.  When the movie critic for the Chicago Herald-American, that rag, dropped dead I wrote a nice letter and got the job.

It wasn't bad, the money was better than I had ever made writing poetry and scholarly articles for dusty little literary magazines, and I was hobnobbing with critics and movie stars, and people were reading what I wrote.  Real people, a lot of them, not just the pencil-chewing, tenure-obsessed, snobs of the ivory tower.

And I hung onto my integrity too.  If I didn't like a movie, no matter what the box office was, I said so.  And the people appreciated that, respected me all the more for writing out the unvarnished truth. 

Julia Janovsky, there was no way to avoid her, she was all over the academy awards, nominated time and time again, but never winning because she was just never that good.  I said so.  She was good enough I allowed, but she never challenged herself, she just stuck to the same role in the same stupid movies, and she was better than that.

She was better than that.  I knew it.  I ran into her in those celebrity things that I was now a part of because I was a respected movie critic, but we never spoke, I to her, or she to me, because there was that thing between us, that deep sky blue thing I guess. 

And then there was that thing, that Emma Goldman movie, that there was talk about making.  It was no star vehicle, Emma was a difficult woman, and it wasn't the sort of thing that the public was particularly into, but it was, I think I said so, the sort of role that a really good actress could show her chops in. 

I hadn't expected that it was the sort of thing that Julia would be interested in, but maybe I did, because when the word came out from Tinsel Town, that Julia Janovsky would be playing the role of Emma Goldman, I wasn't that all surprised.

 

I was surprised when I got the call from Hollywood that they wanted me to work on the script.  Despite the article where I had written favorably about making the movie, I really didn’t know that much about Emma Goldman.  She had been a hero of mine in my youth, but so many of these heroes when you read a lot about them, they don’t seem so heroic, and there was a recklessness about her that I, in my studious manner, didn’t quite approve of. 

And there was the matter of my being a respected cultural critic.  And what of my integrity, wouldn’t that take a hit by my jumping into bed, so to speak, with Hollywood?  But the studio offered train fare, and a nice hotel and it was cold that winter in Chicago.

I expected the glad handing and I admit I was flattered by it.  I allowed my head to be turned, my pretty little head.  The working title of the move was “If I Can’t Dance,” when I objected to this because as I was sure they knew, Emma had never actually said that, their stares were as blank as my classmates when I suggested that the school play be about her.

“Who researched this?” I asked, and was immediately sorry that I had asked.  Sometimes somebody has to stand up for something, and I stood, and it felt good.  “I’m off the project,” I said, not the sort of thing one would say in a faculty meeting, but from my knowledge of Tinsel Town ways, it seemed like something that would ring a bell with them.

There was an immediate hubbub like the sound of a Greek chorus, not that any of the assembled would know what a Greek chorus was, but showbiz, so I have been led to believe, is showbiz.  Of which I believe there is no biz, and much as I knew they had nothing but contempt for the writer, they did know that they needed one.

“Would you like to meet the star?” one of them, their leader I assumed, called out to me as I was making my dramatic leave trailing pages of treatment in my wake.  I turned on my high heels with my best attempt at a withering stare when he added, “Miss Janovsky can be here within the hour.”

As if that would move me, but of course it could.  “I’ll be in my hotel room,” I told them.

 

“Sarah,” she said.  I expected that she would say, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah,” but she just said it the one time, I expected she would say “We need you,” but she said, “I need you.”

“Oh?” I said, meaning to sound like the Queen of Sheba, but sounding more like, oh hell, the girl in the shabby Easter outfit.  Out the window from the top notch hotel room they had put me in with the magnificent view was the Pacific ocean lazily combing its golden sanded beaches.  She stepped to the window, “The deep blue sea,” she said.

Crimently, I thought, a word I hadn’t thought since those days, but you know she didn’t say the deep blue sea that way, the way an actress would, though she was an actress, to close out the third act, before the fourth and closing act, there was a shyness, a hope, to her tone.  She was my friend forever.

I pulled the wrinkled script out of my bag.  There was an original script.  It had been written by some old lefty guy at the beginning of the project before they had called me in, a well meaning guy, but terribly boring, I had marked it all up on the long train ride.  I smoothed it out on the charming little writing desk in front of the window and looked at her with my Bohemian fish eye.  “Brass tacks,” I said.

“Brass tracks,” she agreed.

 

We went over it line by line.  The phone rang a few times, producers, beaus, I don’t know.  She spoke to them with her blonde honey voice a line or two, but she put insistence into it when she told them she would call them back and hung up the phone and we went back to the lines.

The sun went down and the sun came up, the windy political lines were gone.  The hammy lines, which I thought she would like, they were gone too and she didn’t object, not at all, you’re the writer, she told me.  I was, wasn’t I?

“This is good,” she said, after we folded down the last sheet of paper, but still changes would have to be made once the shooting started, just the way of movie making she allowed, still a lot of work ahead, maybe I could use an assistant, maybe her sister, Bernice.

Bernice?  She had been a little shadow in grade school, after that I had not known her at all.  Maybe when I had been following Julia a little in the movie magazines I had read something about an overdose, a bad boyfriend, something like that, or maybe that had been some other star’s little sister, I wasn’t sure.

It would mean so much to her, she had always admired me, Julia told me, she had maybe stumbled a bit, but if she had something, that could mean so much to her.  Sure, I told Julia, that would be fine.

 

Bernice showed up a half hour early, solid as a dollar.  Every hair was in place and her array of pencils were sharpened to the point of being dangerous.  It must have been some other kid sister that I had read about in Silver Screen with the overdose and the arrest.  She was the kind of girl that had made me nervous about my presidency of the student council.  “Now Emma Goldman,” I began, and she slapped down a fat biography which I paged through and it was full of notes in precise handwriting, “was quite a woman,” I ended lamely.

“What we want to do,” I said, regaining my composure, and already she was nodding her head, short quick little nods, her pencil pressed against the page of her brand new notebook, the irises of her eyes big black holes like a baby bird thrusting its neck out of the nest towards that big juicy wriggling worm.  The pencil point broke, but she kept on scribbling.  “Is to tell the story, the real story, the unvarnished story” - that was a little over the top, the unvarnished thing, but I was making a point – “of Emma Goldman, a real person.

“Yes,” she said, “A real person, not some Hollywood conglomerate of a bunch of pithy quotes all wrapped up in melodramatic music set to the tune of some phony anthem of the triumph of the human spirit.”

“Well, yes,” I agreed, noticing a little uneasily how much that sounded like the sort of thing I had written in my reviews.  Well why not though?  It was a valid point.  Hollywood was phony.  Julia was a big star.  Even if she was sincere about wanting to tell the real story, wouldn’t there be pressure on her from the studio to make this into some star vehicle, to make her role, well tinselly? Would she be able to fight that? 

That was what I meant to be my role, to take that whatever, that easiness, that glibness, that take control of the situation, that had led me in my shabby Easter clothes into the deep blue sea in Kaufman’s prairie so long ago because there was something beyond that, beyond the easy way that she had with people, that vision that she had that vision that I knew she had.

“Very well then, I told Bernice as the too sharp point of her pencil snapped against the lined paper, “Let us proceed.”

 

That early stuff, the childhood stuff, her Lithuanian childhood in the repressed Jewish community, the failed marriage to that impotent guy, all very good stuff, but melodramatic, I could see Julia hamming that up, standard suffering victim crap, all wide-eyed poor Emma stuff, helpless good-hearted hanky-wiping star-making gazing at the camera, we could dispense with all that.  Maybe we could come back to that in flashblacks , but shouldn’t we open up with her breaking free of all that, with her breaking from the huddled masses into the wide open horizon of Greenwich Village?   

“Oh absolutely,” Bernice agreed, brushing broken pencil points away with a hurried breath and scribbling on.

It was fine with Julia, who as I expected, wasn’t that interested in the backstory and was eager to get into Greenwich Village romances. 

It wasn’t that fine with the producers who had this whole scene set up where she rescued this whole sledfull of orphans from a runaway sled of drunken Cossacks in a blizzard in picturesque old Saint Petersburg.