Cancer Free, Balls to Bones

Okay, so Mom's scan was all clear. Which means no new tumors; her paralysis is a result of the cyberknife surgery she had two years ago. The good news is there's a possibility the paralysis would go away if her brain swelling subsides on medication. In the meantime, Nurse Sis and I are busy getting a wheelchair and ramp ready in chez Hollywood.

Thanks for all your well-wishes. Mom is in really good spirits now. She's decided if this is going to be her new life, she's going to make the best of it. We're putting in a lot of calls to social workers and house cleaners to see if Nurse Sis and I can get some help (we were barely managing before, so you can imagine now).

Hero was thrilled to see Mom again. He is so cute. I wish I could post a video clip for you all to see our famous little teddy bear.

I got some bad news today that one of my screenplays didn't make the first cut in a competition. I'm trying not to feel down; I've had some really high praise from my UCLA instructors lately, and the head of my program has been talking me up to the faculty because of a short story I read in class on Valentine's Day (here's the anecdote I promised you three weeks ago).

Basically, Hal told us to freewrite in class for twenty minutes fixating on three body parts from the point of view of someone still in infatuation. After we'd written that, he told us to describe the same three body parts as if this person had let you down just like everybody else.

I was in the back cackling with some of my writers group friends. The three body parts I had chosen to write about were (If you're a niece of mine, stop reading now) ...

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a cock and shaved balls. So of course, two guys volunteered to read in class and had written fairly tame, stereotypical stories. "At first I was in love with her eyes and she was pretty, but now I'm sick of her and she's got fat knees and should lose five pounds. Blah blah blah." As my classmate described, they looked lame and probably will never get a date in the class now. Then Hal asked to hear a woman's point of view. When no one stepped up, he looked right at me and told me to get down there.

Hal knows my work from the summer class I had with him, and has seen me cry when I read my work. He knows I'm brutally honest. I've never read any work in the Professional Program in Screenwriting and never would have. But he insisted.

So I went in front of a hundred people, fastened on my microphone, sat next to Hal Ackerman, a guy who can make or break your industry career and read:

"It was the biggest uncircumcised cock I'd ever seen..."

The story continues from there. Needless to say, half the class was cheering and the other half was horrified. Hal was thrilled. It actually is a really great short story, and it's not as salacious as it seems. The point is how great it is at first to be dating this drop dead gorgeous guy, but how by the end it makes me feel like less of a woman because he's so much prettier than me.

I've become a bit of a rock star in the class. One of my classmates said I'd made the two hour commute to class all year worth it in one night. A sixtyish man in my writers class on Tuesday night told me I terrify him. Perfect.