“One fine Tuesday morning two people who married wrong, him to a posh Englishwoman whose monied parents had already declared that they would never accept him, her to a popular standup comedian whose act disparaged women as ‘a bucket of smashed crabs’ and ‘a sack of hot nickels’ but who insisted he had nothing but respect for her, end up sitting next to each other on a train departing New York and bound for Florida. The journey is thirty hours long. Recalibrations of a romantic nature ensue.” That was Michael’s pitch. Diane, the president of the network, tapped a pencil as she listened. She had been married to Michael once. He had been a promising writer with a weakness for homiletic memoranda, especially around the holidays. She had been a production assistant. She rose. He did not fall but remained seated, as it were, at the base of the ladder. Of all the things she remembered about him, foremost in her mind was that he made her mixtape after mixtape but never found his way to the songs that had her name in them. “I’m going to have to stop you there,” she said, and the desperate look in his eyes made her want to kiss him.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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