Weather Watching

Weather Watching

Gorgeous dawn this morning, one of a week full. Black clouds nested low but high enough for pink slanting across the underbelly to produce more than one wow.  And ~ briefly ~ the distinct form of an eagle with pink tailfeathers. Thanks, mother nature.

We’re told an Atmospheric River is about to empty over our coast here starting about now, north getting the greatest impact. Sets me to thinking about weather. Here’s a rainy day story for you.

Just let me say that I’ve seen some weather in my life. The most intense and varied and long running was, so far, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It beat out Yosemite’s High Sierras at 5,000 feet, Vermont’s Green Mountains, Mississippi’s hurricanes, and California’s floods.

I moved from downtown Brooklyn to a teeny town called Bluemont, on a rise of about 200 feet. Not much elevation above the DC swamps, but there’s some configuring the Blue Ridge has done to produce unbelievably intense storms of enormous drama. The hills are abrupt and ferocious rivers (Potomac, Shennandoah) and multitudinous tributaries run at their bases providing constant moisture and interesting wind.

I should add that this town of Bluemont was at the base of a 1750 foot rise named Mt. Weather. A slippery, narrow black ribbonned road led up to the pinpoint of the first  U.S. weather balloon launch. If Ben Franklin had asked George Washington where to find electrified air, George (who as a youthful surveyer lived, I swear, in THAT shed right there, on every single farmer’s south forty) would have sent him south of Phili. In (numerous) winter ice storms the air would blacken right down to your feet, not just bouncing above your head somewhere. The place drew thunder and lightning to the highly forested hilltop. Unbelievable sound and light show. Gene Kruppa, Gabriel, and Michael Jackson all en flagranted on the same stage.

Trees would drop and shatter the air. Phone, electric, and wells would stop and you’d for sure have remembered to top off the cords of firewood with sturdy plastic. That was Bluemont. Two years later I rented a c.1830 log cabin on a 60 acre farm in the middle of nowhere about a mile from Harper’s Ferry. Now THAT place had what you call weather. If you survived til dawn you got an eyeful.

Violent Dawn Across the Pond. Oil on Canvas.
Log Cabin Farm, Virginia

The David Mammet Situation

NOISE

I went to Goddard College in Vermont many years ago. Turns out David Mammet, movie director, and that splendid William Macy, actor, went there too not so many years apart.

I wrote a terrifically good novel called NOISE. The synopsis and part of Chapter 3 are here. I thought wow, if I can get David Mammet to read this, us sharing an alma mater and all, I bet he’d be dying to make it into one fabulous movie and that would change all our lives. I’d get paid a lot for the screen rights, do thousands of paintings for the movie and be hobnobbing with a slew of interesting people in no time at all.

I called the Director/Producers Guild in LA. I’m a member. I got Mammet’s agency. I called the agency. I got Mammet’s agent’s name, phone and email for the assistant to Mammet’s agent.. I emailed one ace damn fine hellova superbo letter to  Mammet’s assistant to Mammet’s agent via the assistant to the assistant who worked for Mammet’s talent agency.

Sweet kid, she said she’d be happy to forward my email to the assistant to Mammet’s agent. What a fabulous ten minutes that all was. I thought this is really incredible. The internet age. I don’t have to make up special stationery and copies and write out addresses and type up inquiries and go to the post office, I’m going to be talking to ol’ David Mammet in a couple of minutes here and he’ll fly up to Big Sur and take a meeting with his old Goddard College writing brilliantly cohort.

It was actually faster than that. Almost as soon as I pressed send on an email thanking the agency assistant for assisting in getting my email to the assistant to the assistant to David Mammet I got an email back!

It said, David is tied up with too many projects now to consider anything new. Good luck elsewhere, David Mammet’s Assistant.

Didn’t anybody notice we both went to the same obscure little peculiar school and shared all kinds of Brooklyn and writing serendipities? I guess not. I thought that the assistant to the assistant likely went to his own little peculiar school where the student body was trained for the very moment they would be sending emails to nettlesome writers with just that kind of phrasing, The big guy has too many projects right now….

When I wrote the book ten years ago I had Kevin Bacon in mind for the lead, I almost wrote it for him and Kyra Sedgewick. I spent a year trying to reach him and gave up. I’ll write about that episode some day, too. NOISE would have changed his life and been the best movie he’d ever done. But there it is. Sometimes there are just too many lions at the gate. Maybe I’ll try William Macy next. Goddard isn’t much in the old boy/girl network department.