waverly acres

I recently read two interesting articles in the New Yorker, which when merged together would make a great screenplay.  They both took place in Florida, a state that fascinates me in its bizarreness.  There’s at least three cultures merging together in odd ways down there:  the redneck Deep South, Jewish New York, and Latin.  There’s a sense of being permanently stuck in the eighties, music and fashion-wise, and a certain lawlessness.  Don’t forget the obscenely rich snots living in Palm Beach, the drug dealers in their oceanfront villas, and the elderly people snarfing up their all you can eat earlybird buffets.  Add in the hazy humid heat, the wildly colored tropical flowers and thick scratchy grass, and alligators creeping along the canals, and who wouldn’t feel a bit off-kilter?

The first article dealt with exotic animals (exotic animal smuggling is big business in Florida) that have escaped into the wild, primarily during hurricanes.  Many of these animals have survived and prospered, in particular iguanas, Nile monitors, and pythons.   As greedy housing developers continued draining swampland building more and more remote subdivisions further inland, they’ve encroached on Python territory.  The pythons have swallowed animals as large as an alligator; who knows what they could eat next? 

The second article dealt with those very subdivisions and how most of them are in foreclosure, disintegrating ghost towns with weeds growing head high in the lawns.  Isolated residents live in the largely abandoned subdivisions, usually renters or people way behind on their mortgage and awaiting eviction.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you found some people just squatting in the homes.  And I’m sure anyone choosing this living situation has an interesting backstory.

So here you have the screenplay.  I am really bad at these high concept pitches, but here goes:  An unscrupulous developer half-builds a fancy subdivision (Waverly Acres–they all have names more suitable to a British shire than Florida swampland) but then goes into foreclosure and abandons the project.  He knows there are pythons in the canals that traverse the subdivision but of course says nothing about it.  Various people move in.  You’ve got our heroine, the wife of a Wall Street banker in New York City, who, after the collapse of his hedge fund, abandons her and her three children with no money.  Familiar with Florida from prior vacations, she snaps up a bargain house–boy, is she in for a surprise.  Then maybe you have some working stiff who actually bought one of the houses at full price but then lost his job.  He is struggling to hang onto the home but his wife has left him with the kids.  Maybe these two will get together.  Then you could have some drug dealer hiding out from the law, or Haitian refugees, or teenage runaways–many possibilities, all with their own backstories.  Put them all together, add in some hungry pythons, and see what happens.

How does this end? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m inclined to leave Waverly Acres to the pythons.

So when I win my Oscar, or at least make multimillions from the licensed plastic snakes with swallowing capability, you heard the idea here first.

I still love you, Jackson

I have to admit I was nervous about seeing Jackson Browne last Tuesday night.  I’ve had a crush on this guy since 1972 and while this was the 17th time I would see him in concert, he hadn’t performed live in Portland in six years.  It was Rosh Hashanah, and we had front row center tickets, a pretty religious experience as far as I’m concerned.  “Let your illusions last until they shatter,” Jackson warned on his album The Pretender, but some illusions deserve to last, and I didn’t want to see Jackson Browne gone all paunchy and washed out. 

Well, nothing to worry about.  He’s sixty and still going strong.  He played a bunch of hard-hitting new songs, and reinterpreted a lot of his old material in a way that expanded their range rather than (like Dylan often does) just tweaking the audience.  Jackson Browne has it all.  He’s an excellent musician on both guitar and keyboards and has a great voice.  Most of all, he is a superb songwriter.  He has a way of conveying deep emotion without cloying sentimentality but also without any irony or remove.  He speaks straight to your soul, or mine, anyway.  Unlike, say, the Rolling Stones, he’s not trying to be twenty, but he hasn’t lost any of the passion or intensity of his youth.  He’s aware of his power to move an audience and he’s not ashamed to use it.

Plus, his hair (yeah, I know its dyed) still hangs in that perfect shock over his eye and he still looks great in his jeans.

praise the lord

Of the presidential candidates left standing, I’m finding myself strangely drawn to Mike Huckabee.  Don’t get me wrong:  no way would I vote for the man for President.  He lacks any conception of the separation of church and state, plus he’s come up with some brilliant ideas like expanding the interstate highway system so people can get home faster and spend more time with their family.  But he seems like a decent guy who would make  a good friend, which is more than I can say for the rest of this egocentric, power hungry cast of characters.  In general, I don’t think evangelical Christians deserve the bad rap George W Bush has brought down upon them.

Religion is an amplifying mirror.  It can only resonate off the character within.  Given a vacuous bully like Bush, there’s not a whole lot of character to work with, so his concept of religion is bound to be lacking in insight or empathy, if not downright mean.  There are plenty of people who aren’t genuinely spiritually conscious at all but exploit other people’s sincere religious faith for their own greedy and violent purposes. But in a person of good character religious faith can give them the strength to summon the best of themselves, to be truly giving and forgiving, to get through hard times with strength and dignity.

You can get to that place through any religious tradition, but I think the appeal of a “born again” type of religion is that it is direct and simple.  In my religious tradition, Judaism, you have to muddle through a lot of legalistic abstraction before arriving at any spiritual enlightenment.  Besides, unless you’re into Kabbalah, the entire rationalist mindset of modern Judaism mitigates against transcendescence.  It would be a lot easier to have the Holy Spirit envelop you and fall to the floor writhing and speaking in tongues.  While in Italy we visited a holy site where in the 5th century the archangel Michael was said to have descended to earth with a heavenly sweater.  Pilgrims from all over the world stood by the site of the sweater (long vanished) bringing their prayers, their sick and their crippled.  My husband and I left because we felt out of place there, disrespectful somehow.  We were tourists.  These pilgrims believed.  And who knows, maybe that belief cured some of their sick and crippled.

The icon doesn’t have power, but the faith does.  I have been at mental places over the past few years where if a holy sweater shrine had appeared in the vicinity, I would have prayed at it.  I can’t buy into the idea of a son of God taking human form and descending upon one human being on one little planet in the whole infinite universe to carry my personal burdens upon his shoulders, but it would be nice.  I understand the desire.  There is a place where reason stops and something more power and all-encompassing needs to take over.

Lots of people I otherwise feel allied with politically and culturally don’t seem–I don’t know exactly how to phrase it–humbled by the immensity and mystery of the world.  Every problem has a diagnosis, an explanation, a prescription pill to make it all go away.  A woman in my old book group once stated confidently, “None of our children will ever do anything really bad.”.  Well, you know what?  They can. And so can she.  There is evil, and there is redemption.

Which brings us back to born-again Christians.  I have known some very nice ones.  There was Frank, one of the sweetest boys I knew in high school.  There was the director of activities at my fathers home for Alzheimer’s patients who puts way more than perfunctory effort into his job.  There is my brother’s friend, who despite her busy career and family, finds time to bring my father blueberry juice and chocolate and sit with him while he watches the same movie again and again.  There was the lady coming back from a “Christian conference” who told her husband and two little sons to wait while she helped me and my crying baby gather our luggage.  There is the building manager who opened a gallery on the first floor of the building so that my very talented daughter could get her artwork out of her apartment and out into the world.