A Different Kind of Forever - By Dee Ernst Page 0,2
shirt and jeans.
“I’d do him,” she said aloud. Jasper the cat wrapped around her ankles, purring.
“What do you think, baby,” she asked him. “Could I get a rock star?”
The cat sat and began to lick his front paw.
“Didn’t think so,” she said, and got ready for work.
She drove through the early afternoon. Her first class was not until two. If she was lucky, and no one saw her sneak into her office, she could have almost an hour alone to work on her play. It had been accepted for production at Merriweather Playhouse, a small, private theater connected to Franklin-Merriweather University. She taught at Dickerson College, a liberal arts college whose campus adjoined the University.
She had gotten the idea for “Mothers and Old Boyfriends” five years before, when she went to Ohio without her daughters to attend the wedding of her college roommate. She had been invited to spend the night before the wedding at Judy’s, with two other women, Judy’s sister and her childhood friend. Diane had not met the other two women before, but they all clicked immediately, and after the rehearsal dinner, they sat in Judy’s living room and talked about their younger college days, and about their mothers and all of their old boyfriends.
When Diane decided to take Sam French’s playwriting class a few years later, she wrote about the four women coming together: but in addition to those four characters, the four different mothers and all those ex-lovers became part of the story, stepping in and out of conversations, and having discussions of their own that ran counterpoint to what the women had to say. Only in theater could the line between fantasy and reality be so easily crossed. Diane wrote steadily, her fingers tripping over each other in her eagerness to get the words down, and Sam French loved the result, doing the piece the following year as a read-through in a Master’s workshop. Then he asked if he could direct it in full as part of the winter schedule. Franklin-Merriweather had never done an original work before. This would be a first.
It would be a busy summer for her. In addition to the play, she would be teaching a graduate level class the following year, beginning in January. Normally, she would spend at least part of the summer traveling, but this year she would be home with her daughters for the whole three months, working.
She was lucky when she got to work. She slipped into her office unnoticed and began to read through the notes Sam French had left for her. Act 1’s second and fifth scenes were dragging. She made the changes, working on the hard copy before putting changes into the computer. She lived in terror of the computer losing everything, and would print out any and all changes in addition to saving them onto a disk.
Marianne Thomas poked her head in a few minutes before class. She was 50, almost six feet tall, and the most beautiful woman Diane had ever known. Part Chinese, part African-American, Marianne was brilliant, a lesbian, and had been Diane’s good friend for years, besides being her boss.
“Can I have a minute?” she asked.
Diane nodded, hit the save button, and turned to her friend. “Ten minutes. What’s up?”
“I’m thinking of using Torino’s for the picnic. You’ve had their food, what do you think?”
Diane pursed her lips. Every year, at the end of spring term, Marianne invited all Dickerson’s faculty to a picnic at her old farmhouse. It had become something of a tradition, and Marianne took it very seriously.
“They’re good, but they’re kind of a small operation. Can they handle that many people?”
Marianne looked thoughtful. “Good point. I’ll have to think. I may get a country western band to play instead of a DJ. I think it would be a hoot. Can you imagine Peter Ferrell trying to line dance? It might be worth the thousand dollars for that alone.”
Diane grinned. “You’re awful. He is a perfectly nice man, why do you pick on him so much?”
“Because he honestly believes the spaceship is due back any day now. Isn’t that why you stopped dating him?”
“No. Well, maybe. He was a little too cerebral for me.”
Marianne snorted delicately. “And this from a woman who reads Tibetan poetry for fun. How about a movie this weekend? Something in English, please?”
Diane nodded. “Sure. Saturday night. But we’ll have to make it late. Megan’s car-wash fundraiser is Saturday, and I’ve got the afternoon shift.”