Monday, January 31, 2011

Calling All Linemen




If there’s an ice storm in your future, there could be a lineman there, too. I’ve fallen under the spell of a Jimmy Webb song about a lineman, made famous by Glen Campbell. “Wichita Lineman” may be the song of the week if the Weather Channel knows what they’re predicting about an ice storm, and if Webb was referring to Wichita, Kansas.

The lines that seem the most relevant to the forecast go like this:

I know I need a small vacation/
But it don’t look like rain/
And if it snows that stretch down south/
Won’t ever stand the strain.

Little did I know until this week that I was already a Jimmy Webb fan back in my preschool days when my record collection included the 5th Dimension.

Other Jimmy Webb songs include “Up, Up and Away,” "MacArthur Park" and “Highwayman.” Here's to all the great lines by Jimmy!

I hear you singing through the wire/
I can hear you through the whine.
Jimmy Webb, "Wichita Lineman"

Monday, January 17, 2011

Some Answers and a Bigger Question

Here are the answers to yesterday’s tagline quiz:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Godzilla

Erin Brockovich

Meet the Parents

And now here is a question: How come a root problem is often overlooked while the consequent, lesser problems get full attention?

Let me tell you a story. Several years ago at my daughter’s high school, there was a violent attack. I was scheduled to speak on tobacco prevention at the school that afternoon, and that morning my daughter sent me an e that read: “Mom, don’t come to school—too much violence.”

I didn’t read her e before leaving home that day. When I got to the school, the halls had been secured and the knife had been confiscated by the authorities. People told me what (they thought) happened.

I didn’t find out what really happened until several days later, in the evening, in the school gymnasium during an address by the principal that I had requested he give. The district superintendent was present as were many concerned students and parents.

It turns out that there was a student attending the school who had severe psychological illness. His illness was manifesting in many ways, including alignment with Nazism. The white student had been picking on black students for weeks. The black students couldn’t take it anymore.

Prior to the outbreak of violence on campus, the administration of the school, not recognizing the student’s mental illness, went to the trouble of hiring a mediator to come to the school to fix the poor race relations. The mentally healthy students were forced to sit in a room for several hours a day with the mentally unbalanced student to try patch up their differences.

Only after violence erupted at the school, did administrators look back on the situation and say, “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.” I can still hear those words as plain as day.

Mental illness goes unrecognized all the time. Awareness of mental illness is lacking. Until we address this problem, violent acts like the one at my daughter’s school and the one at the Safeway in Tucson will continue.

It is growing increasingly difficult for me to bite my tongue when every day, a new spin is given to the Tucson shootings—the need for concealed weapon permits, the consequences of political hate rhetoric and anything else you want to mention. The moral of the story should be let’s do more to spread awareness of the symptoms of mental illness and to make the general public aware of how to report mental illness.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

What's My (Tag)line?

It’s time for the Golden Globes, and in 1962, “What’s My Line” won an award for the best television show. If you don’t remember it, no worries, it’s not the Ambien amnesia setting in; the show stopped airing in 1967.

The panelists had to guess the contestant’s line of work (hence line) through a series of questions. You might enjoy this clip of Frank Lloyd Wright on the show.

Yesterday I played a different kind of What’s My Line. I tried to finalize a tagline of sorts for my novel manuscript. A tagline is a marketing slogan, often used for movies. And while I do have a treatment for a screenplay on file with WGA, this month I’m writing query letters to agents, and I need to succinctly capture the plot of my novel manuscript in a sentence.

Despite posting on Facebook that my resolution for this year is to drive to the beach the first day it’s 70 degrees in Wilmington, a more serious endeavor is working on my novel manuscript every day. It’s amazing how inspiration flows in effortlessly when you commit to fifteen or thirty minutes of imposed concentration a day. And I really prefer moments of inspiration to hours of fretful consternation.

Yesterday my inspiration came to me over lunch. Since I’m reading The Herald-Sun while my neighbor is away for the weekend, I peeked at the newspaper TV listings for the first time in a long time.

Have you ever paid attention to the taglines of movies in the TV listings?

Try these and see if you can name the movie:

"A youth learns that his father is the Greek god Poseidon."

"A giant mutant lizard wreaks havoc in New York."

"A woman probes a power company cover-up over poisoned water."

"A man spends a disastrous weekend with his lover’s family."

I’ll post the names of the movies tomorrow on the blog.

Reading taglines really energized me yesterday. First, I was able to pick up my index card grocery list for Whole Foods and write a sentence about my story: A song takes a woman back to the man she loves. Next, I was able to frame my life past and future by considering what a writer would say the tagline of my life is.

If you’re looking for inspiration on the heels of your resolutions this January, think like a marketing executive and pen your own tagline. Try writing one for your past and go ahead and acknowledge a weakness if you must. But when you write one for your future, write yourself out of your current conflict.

May all your taglines come true!

She's making movies on location/ She don't know what it means/ And the music make her want to be the story/ And the story was whatever was the song--what it was
"Skateaway" Mark Knopfler