Beer, wine, baby?
It used to be when you’re going to a house party, you don’t show up empty-handed. And it used to be that a six-pack or a bottle of red wine would suffice, but no longer. Apparently unless you show up with an infant in a baby bjorn or a toddler toddling about, you have come unequipped; you might as well have come empty-handed and then planted yourself in front of the bar, drinking the best thing out on it.
And I don’t want to say that Nazis or Hawthorne had the right idea, but wouldn’t it serve everyone in attendance all that much better if the moms had to wear color-coordinated tags? A very simple system indicating which of these women are single moms and/or those interested in becoming single moms from the ones who had husbands or baby-daddies at home watching football and drinking their own beer from the ones for whom the very idea of sex brings up dark visions of stretch marks and morning sickness?
Of course, the party the previous evening had its own coding problem. When you show up fashionably late (how late? The game of Trivial Pursuit was already in progress) how are you to know that in the spirit of fairness (or maybe we also showed up too late for the keys to go in the bowl) that the couples had been divided up so that partners in life were not teammates in the game. By the by, the three of us who were single beat the happy loving couples in that most trivial of games which just seems to indicate that single people must be smarter, right?

A Rose by Any Other Name, my “soon” to be published short story collection is still on the shelf just awaiting its cover photo. As I am actually quite a believer that one can actually often judge a book by its cover, this is a matter of no small consequence. I am ready to order the proof save for that one factor.
In the meanwhile, the video projects are slightly slowed as well so I may start lining up the next book to get pushed out of the nest: my novel “Live Fast! (Die Out of Town)” which is adapted from my own screenplay and movie. I think I am going to plunder my own work and novelize a few more of my scripts; if I can’t sell them as movies perhaps I can sell them as books (and not have to collaborate with people who don’t know what the word means) and then when someone (who? I don’t know) turns around and says that the book would make a good movie, I can “write” the screenplay quickly, right?
Or, I could just have a screenplay going out of business sale…