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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Writing Prompt: Celebrity Sighting

By Marilyn Friedman
We have lots of wonderful classes to help you stay on track with your writing resolutions, including these fantastic classes that start next weekend: From Bedtime Stories To Tales of Teenage Woe: Writing For Kids and YA (only 2 spots left) and Lights, Camera, Action: Screenwriting Boot Camp (only 1 spot left) which includes a pitch session to creative execs at the end of the class!  I hope to see you soon, and I can't wait to see your response to the prompt below.

Book Publishing 
•How To Hook An Agent

Children's Writing and YA
•From Bedtime Stories To Tales of Teenage Woe: Writing For Kids and Young Adults Pt I
•From Bedtime Stories To Tales of Teenage Woe: Writing For Kids and Young Adults Pt III

Creative Writing/Multi Genre
•So You Want To Be A Writer?
•Finishing School

Fiction, Memoir, Romance
•From Aphrodite To Zeus: Myth Fueled Stories
•Storytelling at Light Speed: The Art of Flash Fiction
•I Love You Silly: Crafting The Perfect Romance Novel

Journalism, Personal Essay and Web Writing
•Personal Essay II: The Advanced Class
•Literary Feast: Writing A Culinary Masterpiece
•Blogger's Paradise: Creating Irresistible Content
•You in 1200 Words: Writing and Publishing The Personal Essay

Playwriting and Writing For Actors
•Ex’s, Bosses, and Crazy Relatives: Creating Characters For The Stage
•It's All About You: A One-Person Show Workshop
•From The Page To The Stage: Finish That One-Person Show

Screenwriting
•Lights, Camera, Action: Screenwriting Boot Camp
•Meet Me Now, Squeeze Me Later: Crafting the Studio Romantic Comedy
•Work The Room: Mastering The Power of The Pitch


Writing Prompt: Make a list of 3 memorable (or imagined) celebrity sightings that you've had.  Pick one and add a sensory detail to it (smell, taste, sound, touch) and write for 10 minutes about it.  Then, post your writing in the comments of this blog for the chance to win a free writing class. A few weeks ago, I sat behind Jake Gyllenhaal on a plane back from San Francisco so I probably will write about that!

What memorable celebrity sighting have you had?  Post your 10 minute write in the comments of this blog, and you could win a free class!
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1 comment:

Jennifer Aston said...

The hostess Stand of Kevin Costner's new restaurant, Twin Palms was its own beauty pageant, slash, sardine can. We were a vapid gaggle of star struck girls dismissively seating the non-celebrity to patron the latest restaurant scene only too ready to risk high-heel ankle injury getting back to ground zero, ready in wait for the next A-lister to enter looking to be seen. Squeals of delight always preceded a palpable sense of competition. To anyone in the know, it was as ugly up there as it was beautiful.

Only, I never got it. Having grown up with, Ashley Judd and having been beside her through her rise, accompanying her on the set of many movies, I don't know. I guess I was just immune to the glee of celebrity. So, it was an easy give on my part when menus I was holding in preparation to escort a party to its table were deftly whisked out of my grasp by one of the other girls because it was a who's who who they happened to care about. Even some B-listers where elevated to time-worthy if, by the gift of nostalgia, they won their way into a hostess’s teeny tiny heart. I never gave it much though either way. I took pride in it in fact. I was immune and I think, superior, in my own mind at least, for the very fact I could be so elevated and unaffected. Then, I was humbled. But good. It is dangerous to seat yourself so high, as I found out.

Stephan Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist ( NOT cosmetologist ladies ). He cannot speak, he cannot move. Because of an aggressive form of disease he is bound to a wheelchair and speaks with help from a very savvy computer. He is physically inert, BUT he is an erudite, heady man on wheels and one thinking girls version of a rock-star and all around bad ass. So, when, on one magical night he was wheeled into my restaurant by his then nurse, would be wife ( talk about opportunist ) you could say, I lost my chicken. Of course in that moment I was the only one loosing my chicken and I was prepping for stiff competition among apparently no one else other than myself to be the one seating this icon of a man. I'm a Kentucky girl, born and raised. My energy in that moment was one fantastic mix of sticky sweet Southern charm and ' first bitch to touch one of my menus looses an arm'.

The wheelchair needed special accommodating, naturally. As a result, Mr. Hawking and his opportunistic nurse's table was into the farther, more open reaches of the restaurant. More to my delight, because it meant more time with my lover. As we moved to their table I said.... no, I gushed, " O, Stephen R. Covey, I looove your work!". " I just can't believe my good luck, Mr. Covey. " " I mean, I hope you will forgive me, I'm absolutely gushing here, but you are the most brilliant man and..." Then, " O my gosh, Mr. COVEY, your book ' A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME? Loved it!" " Mr. Covey, Mr. Covey Mr. Covey".
It all echoes in my mind like some horrible horrible train wreck. One you drive by, and you see horrible, awful, life changing carnage, but somehow, you keep looking. Like there's a rolling head and it's a where’s Waldo game.

Not until I was a full half-way back to " ground zero " did it occur to me that, in my exuberance for having kept the briefest company with one of the world's most brilliant minds I, for a full 5 minutes or more, referred to him repeatedly as Stephen R. Covey. A self-help book writer and author of, " THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE. "

Suddenly Mr. Hawking's monotone computer generated, Thank you sounded much in my mind like, " fuck off."

January 19, 2012 at 1:59 PM

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