Attended a writing group at the (really nice) house of my playwriting professor this afternoon. I hadn’t thought it would be too hard getting over there by 1:00 p.m. (to the intersection of the 405 and Sunset Boulevard), but I got very little sleep last night, and I got a late start. (I live on a street that faces Frat Row, and last night around 2:00 a.m. it sounded like the apocalypse was happening over there.) Then there’s no parking center tram on weekends, so I had to walk about 45 minutes to the parking center just to get my car. It’s such a pain retrieving my car that by the time I pulled onto the 10 freeway, the prospect of escaping the immediate confines of University Park almost made me feel like the Count of Monte Cristo. Miraculously, I arrived at my professor’s house almost exactly on time. The group was really interesting.
Then afterward we went out to eat at a fancy cafe. I started talking to the guy who gave me a ride, who’s a recent graduate of the MPW program that I’m in. He had read a section of his new nonfiction project. I asked him, “It’s sort of autobiographical?” and he was like, “Yeah. You see, when I first moved out to L.A. when I was 18, I was living with this girl, and then she moved out and for a while she was making $100,000 a year as a mistress of the Sultan of Brunei, then she moved back here and was living with Charlie Sheen, and invited me to move into his guest cottage, and then for a while we were working for this crazy scientist guy who was trying to do genetic engineering on sperm and eggs to create a superhuman race.” And I was like, “You mean, using your sperm?” And he was like, “Yeah. I guess since she was so pretty and he thought I was so talented, he wanted to use our DNA.” We’d been talking about my science fiction earlier, and he said, “So yeah, it sounds like science fiction, but it’s not.” And I was like, “Okay yeah, I’d read that.”
Leave a Reply