The Bard and Me

Today we had a table read of William Shakespeare's play, King Lear, and I got to read the role of his eldest, greedy, hard-hearted daughter Goneril. She plots with her sister to spend as little as possible of the wealth their father bestowed on them. Although she starts the ball rolling, I have to admit that her sister Regan does her one better. Goneril wants her dad to get rid of half his hundred men (just more mouths to feed), but Regan wants him to bring only 25 to her house. In the end, both Goneril and Regan agree that King Lear needs no men to protect him and refuse to feed even one.

It was my first chance at doing Shakespeare since I did a modern version of Hamlet in high school. It was great fun and I'm looking forward to next Sunday when we'll do another read of it. Then it's on to doing a real stage reading of it.

Agents Do the Darndest Things

One of my favorite parts of Comic Con is the Professionals Lounge. There you can rest your weary feet from fighting your way through 125,000 people without getting down and sitting on the floor in hallways which have no chairs. You can meet up with friends whom you can't find in the 125,000 crowd and multiple rooms holding 4,000 to 6,500 people and you can meet new friends. You can have a cup of coffee without waiting in the long lines for the one Starbucks in the convention center, have meetings, and most important of all, actually hear the person you call on your cell phone. Definitely one of my favorite places at Comic Con -- it's sanctuary.

This con I had an encounter that is just one of those typically absurd quirks of Hollywood. It started with a nice conversation with a writer in the Professionals lounge. He told me about the novel he was writing and I told him about how I was going to turn a script I had shelved in the mid nineties into a novel -- because a TV and film writer friend suggested I do that. I mentioned how surprised I was that the friend had even remembered reading it, let alone continued to think highly enough of it to suggest I turn it into a novel, but that all is a different story so I don't want to dwell too much on it here.

There was an added bonus to talking to this writer because he was easy on the eyes and long-haired -- a winning combination for me (hey, I'm a red-blooded American female, so sue me for thinking like a female.) -- so later when I ran into him on the convention floor, I, of course, said hello and some quick amusing quip. He was with a woman, whom he introduced as his agent. After he told her my name, she turned to me and quite blatantly asked me what I did. So I told her, I'm a writer. She literally jumped backwards away from me, saying "Uh-oh."

She was gone before I could say, "Hey, you asked me... I didn't jump in with that."

You would think that if she were that afraid that the mere meeting of a writer would put her in jeopardy of being chased for representation, she would read the badge first. That a badge that says "Professional" on it at a convention with professional writers and artists would stand a good chance of being on a WRITER. And if you were laying low from writers, you wouldn't go asking them what they did for a living the moment you meet them. Or at least I wouldn't, if I didn't want to know.

Guess that's Hollywood, though.