Honey No. 39
Feat. a humbling assessment from a three year old, and a guide to the creative process from a tv writer/local genius
On Thursday night I babysat for a little girl I’ve known about a year now. She’s only three years old in this life but has clearly been around for centuries, displaying an uncanny prowess for one-liners and drama. Whenever I go over there I come home overflowing with stories for Jesse and my friends, and several of her sayings have become our regular exclamations.
She was sleepy on Thursday night, so we spent our evening watching Bluey rather than starting up our usual game of Doctor where she pretends to give me a shot and then cut my hair while she whispers “perfect.” When it was time to get ready for bed she shuffled upstairs in silence, quietly brushed her teeth, and gently agreed to one last bathroom break before bed. But the potty, it is common knowledge, makes Chatty Cathies of us all.
“Do you have a baby?” she asked me, her tiny body drooping into the toilet. “No,” I replied, “I don’t have a baby.” “Oh…” she considered. “Well what do you have?"
I understood her confusion, and even remembered the feeling. The majority of adults in her life- her parents, her teachers, the parents of her friends-all existed to take care of children, in many cases her specifically. Grownups are mommies and daddies, and I certainly wasn’t a kid, so if I wasn’t a mommy then what the hell was I?
I tried to quickly offer some context. “Do you mean do I have a dog or a cat?” She nodded. “Well I don’t have either of those right now. But! You remember how my birthday is at the beginning of January and yours is at the end? Well maybe after it’s my birthday and then your birthday I might get a little dog!” I told her, unsure if this was actually true but figuring I might as well throw her a lifeline. “Oh…” she replied, her little brow furrowing. “So right now you have…nothing?”
On a different day this rock-solid check-in might have chucked me into a good, old-fashioned existential spiral. At 33 my life is so beautiful and rich in ways that I could never have predicted, and also as someone who wants kids and the kind of stability that my 90’s upbringing seemed to promise was possible, I am sitting with a lot of question marks about how all of that is going to happen.
So…what do I have?
I have a gift card to Anthropologie that has $23.63 on it that I keep meaning to put in my wallet but then rediscovering in my dresser.
I have wide, flat feet that make shoes hard to shop for but that make tree pose in yoga a breeze.
I have a tailor that I love, and that’s a lot.
I have a crazy ear for anything musical or even vaguely rhythmic and can recite full poems that I learned in kindergarten for a recital that my mother describes as one child (me) reciting the poems so loudly that one by one all the other kids stopped participating until I was left loudly, and happily, performing alone.
I have a body that tells me right away when a scent is too strong or a light is too bright or a food is no good. I have a body that has a strong draw to beauty and desire for comfort and a low tolerance for things that are not good for me. I have a finely tuned alarm system that came free with the property.
I have a mug that I got on tour in Seattle six years ago that was handmade by a local artist and everyone in my cast scoffed at the cost but the investment didn’t sink me and it makes me happy every day.
I have an effect on the man at the farmers market who sells microgreens that makes him stuff SO many sprouts into the plastic clamshell that it overflows and he has to wrap the whole operation in a plastic bag, and even when I exclaim THAT’S ENOUGH MICROGREENS he still tucks a few more in there, as if to say, I got you girl, which forces me to eat so many microgreens a day in order to keep them from going bad that I have to assume he is sponsored by my medical doctor.
I have parents who will pick up my phone calls almost any time of day, who have helped me to cultivate and channel my true self since the beginning, a gift whose rarity and impact I realize more each passing year.
I have a brother with cutting wit and my identical laugh, and when we get each other going we sound like a chorus of chortling frogs. I don’t know how I would do it all without him.
I have friends who hold me like family, who I can practice hard conversations with, whose wins make me wish I had learned to play the trumpet.
I have a follow-up eye doctor appointment on October 3rd where they asked me to wear a pair of the contacts they gave me but I wore them all because I thought they were free samples and I hope I don’t get in trouble but also they should have been more clear.
I have a printer, a car, and an in-unit washer dryer, a trio that I distinctly remember declaring to be the pinnacle of wealth at some point in my twenties.
I have a partner who loves me in ways that leave me speechless, and I have never felt more loved or more safe or more sure.
I have multiple cities that feel like home, with well-worn grooves that are thick with memories.
I have a Myspace account that I have no idea how to access. And a Xanga, since we’re on the topic.
I have HPV, but so does everyone.
I have a notification set for “free rocks” on facebook marketplace.
I have tickets to a concert tonight so I’ll have to wear comfortable shoes.
I have a life that I’m trying to say yes to every day, to trust where it is leading me and be brave enough to explore the parts that scare me. I have a growing team to celebrate with, to mourn with, to brace each other in the ups and downs of the relentless pursuit of a rich, fulfilling life. I have so much in the way of unconventional milestones, so much love in my world it could make my dang heart explode…
….but none of this makes much sense to a three-year-old, so rather than explaining I just helped her off the toilet, wiped her butt, and put her to bed.
She’ll understand it all someday. I hope she has it too.
Jen Jackson is a tv writer, a dear friend, and the director and co-creator of a musical I’m currently in where I play a very sexy whale. Unpacking that below!!
I love to learn about creative people’s routines and schedules and processes. I have that stupid little book, Daily Rituals, that tells you how much coffee Emily Dickinson drank and how many times a day Kafka took a shit. Right now, my friend Louisa Kellogg and I are in the midst of putting up a musical in Los Angeles. When Olivia (who is playing pop star sperm whale Mary Enya in said musical!) suggested writing about the process of making the show, I thought, “We just kind of did it???” But actually, we’ve had a very distinct process, and if you like reading about creative habits as much as I do, maybe you will find it interesting.
1. Inspo (inspiration)
I was reading In The Heart of The Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, which is a fantastic nonfiction book about the sinking of the whaleship Essex – the same disaster Moby Dick was based on – when I came upon a curious passage describing the women of Nantucket during the height of whaling mania in the mid-1800s. The women wanted to marry sailors because they would be gone ALL the time on whaling adventures, leaving the girls to chill and run the island in peace. Also, during renovations of a lot of old Nantucket homes, people would find plaster dildos hidden in the walls. Basically, the gals were having a blast while the guys were away. The book then returns to its main focus: man versus nature, etc. But I was like, “whoa, seems like there’s another story here???” I didn’t do any more research whatsoever to find out if this story had already been told, I simply jotted a note in my iPhone “women dildos nantucket whaling times” to be used at a later date.
2. Find a Friend
Writing stuff by yourself is too hard. Writing with a hilarious friend who has the same Protestant work ethic as you is much better. So I asked my friend Louisa if she’d like to go on a walk and talk about working on a creative project together. We were both pretty tired of writing pilots that went nowhere and having meetings about vague ideas for scripted podcasts that paid seventy three cents a year. As we spitballed, I told her about the Nantucket women and she found it quite intriguing as well, especially because she was already a Moby Dick Head™. I had written an odd bad first-person POV short story about one of these women that I shared with her, and from there we decided to write it as a play because this seemed like the least profitable medium for us. If we were going to do it, we’d do it purely as a creative exercise versus as a way to get on the writing staff of American Dad.
3. Invest in Lunch
Almost every week since our project began, Louisa and I meet up at the Los Feliz Par 3 Golf Course Cafe to “work on our play.” But first, we order lunch and chat with our favorite server who often hands us two cups of water and says “two tequilas!” We always laugh with him about this joke, can you imagine if they were tequilas! Anyway, settling into a routine of delicious lunch + 2 hours of work is something I really look forward to. It’s like we’re at an office, but we’re outside, I am eating a tuna melt, and there’s a golf competition of stoic-looking tween girls happening nearby. All this is to say, the pleasure of eating lunch with a friend has kept this project going as much as the creative drive behind the project itself. And now weekly lunch has snowballed into a production involving 14 performers, 14 original songs, and quite a few props. It is really neat what lunch has done for us!
4. The Hilarious Quakers of Nantucket
I’m pretty sure we started our writing process with characters. People on and around Nantucket in the 1800s who amused us. People like the richest man in town, who suffered from severe penis gout (he has since been cut from the play). Water-skiing Ben Franklin (Ben Franklin has since been cut from the play). A catatonic widow who gets frozen inside a big block of ice (the widow has since been cut from the play – kind of rude to ask an actor to play a frozen woman for a whole play). But we generated a list of characters we wanted to explore, and then started building a story from there. We knew our protagonist would be anti-whaling and that there would be a horde of Nantucket women who loved the Bible and jerking off.
5. Add Music SUBHEAD: What If We Met The Whales?
There were two big discoveries in our early lunch-and-write process. 1) This play should be a musical. 2) If we’re doing a musical about whaling, we should definitely meet the whales, because whales are famous songstresses. Those were equally fun discoveries because neither Louisa nor I knew how to write songs, and how were we going to set a play half underwater?? A big part of this process could be called “embracing the unknown” or “ignorance is bliss” or “if I had children, I wouldn’t have so much free time to indulge in whimsy.”
6. Get REAL
By the grace of Quaker god, our musical director Brian Heveron-Smith was presented to us as someone who is good at songs. Brian somehow turned our ideas (“Maybe like a fast song? Or it could be slow?”) into actual music, and nothing was as exciting as hearing his demos for the very first time. Brian took his job of making songs like “Blubber Lover” and “Today Sucks Ass” very seriously, which in turn made us take our jobs more seriously. All of a sudden, this was a real thing instead of a silly little writing exercise that lived in our laptops. Let’s say the musical is bread. If we were the flour, Brian was the yeast that made the bread rise. Brian, sorry for calling you The Yeast. Also, Brian is teaching me drums and you should hire him for music lessons.
7. Test the Waters
Early on, we held a mini reading of our play for our writing group and a few other friends. This was before Brian joined us, so we told our friends who were reading in it to “just sing the songs to any tune.” Great direction from us. But the big note was: more songs! We rewrote the whole play with this in mind, shifting focus from above-ground Nantucket to underwater…ocean…where we meet an all-girl whale pop star group and a lovesick DJ named DJ. We tinkered with this version for probably another whole year, adding and subtracting to make sure we weren’t splitting focus too much between land and sea. We’d trade sections back and forth to make sure we were each leaving our mark on things – Louisa is really good at writing sexy whalesong lyrics and jokes about Quaker piety, and I love to riff on the try-hard boy whale that lives with a small crab who wants to be a standup comedian. With a new draft in hand, we asked a group of our very talented friends to perform a staged reading of this version of the musical to a whole lot more people, and that went great! We got more feedback which led us to do another big ol’ rewrite.
8. Be Ruthless
We secured an 80-minute time slot at a popular Los Angeles theater to put up our show, however the previous version of our musical ran almost 2 hours. So we were tasked with writing a condensed version. A lot changed. And we’ve had quite a few people ask us why we changed so much when the staged reading was a success. Mostly, it was out of necessity. We cut four characters and eliminated quite a few storylines. It was painful. RIP Dick’s Tackle Box, a comedy club run by dolphins who make fun of the way you look. But Louisa and I were on the same page about what needed to go, and having spent years writing for The Onion, we have fairly thick skin when it comes to killing our little baby darlings. As the lead in our play, Jordan Lee Cohen, has told us many times, “You guys wrote two different musicals about whales.” We’ve probably written about six at this point. But they all have the same DNA, which is a mix of lobster piss and the cashew cheese they use to make the vegan burrito at the Los Feliz Par 3 Golf Course Cafe.
9. Mine Your Social Network for Talent and Then Pay Them For Their Work
As a former Chicagoan, I am surrounded by a vast network of talented performers in LA who are generous with their time. So casting the musical was a dream. But all of these Chicago friends have already done a lifetime of free work for Charna Halpern, so we wanted to make sure they were being paid for their singing, dancing, and harpoon-chucking. I guess this section should be called “use your TV script fee to pay for your musical.” Also, hire the most organized person you know to produce your musical. In our case, it is friend of the Honeypot, Dan McGraw, who is so on top of things that I often wonder how we functioned before he joined us.
11. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!
Yes.
10. Shamelessly Plug Your Musical
Come see “Shipping” at the Elysian on Thursday, October 17 at 7:30 and Friday, October 18 at 8pm!
11. Treat Yourself to Lunch
You deserve it! And you never know, maybe you’ll think of something to write about.
Have a wonderful weekend my friends! This week Jesse roasted up some kabocha squash with salt and pepper, cumin, and pumpkin spice and the whole thing tasted like unreal CANDY, I may never be over it. Don’t forget to get your tickets to Shipping! Rumor has it they’re going fast…
xx Olivia