In Honor of our 8th Film Festival
To Minneapolis, by way of NOLA
There’s a special discomfort in sharing an early draft. It’s a bit like a pregnancy ultrasound: the very earliest ones, you turn them sideways, squint and think “oh! Okay, yes, I see the head; there’s an ear!” The technician takes it from your hand and turns it right side up and says, “that’s her butt.” Or perhaps worse yet, those shadowy, terrifying 3-D imaging ones from late pregnancy – you see a mangled alien face looming from the dark, and as you shake off this haunting glimpse into Uncanny Valley, you tell yourself “I mean, he’s still baking in there. I see how that’s going to be a human…eventually!” There’s something very fun about getting to see the thing before it’s a Thing. A bit fuzzy around the edges, but full of possibility and potential. Early drafts are like that, too.
This month our film “The Albatross Cafe” heads to The Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, our 8th festival. This short began its life in 2021 while we spent 10 beautiful months in New Orleans. These were still deep-pandemic days when the future was blurry and compromised. We arrived in the city two days before January 6th and watched the country flip upside down from the Mardi-Gras-themed living room of our Uptown rental.
The Carnival season was canceled that year. Instead of parades full of marching bands, dancers, and floats, residents decorated their homes and invited strangers to admire them from the sidewalk; “House Floats” they were called. It was both fun and sad.
While we immediately took to New Orleans’s layabout, weirdo tendencies, the uncertainty of our direction in life and impermanence of our living situation left us with feelings of isolation; we were suspended in a humid snowglobe – only instead of snow, it rained mosquitoes and multi-colored, plastic beads.
We weren’t alone, though. There were romantic flings and new local friends met via other, faraway friends. We enjoyed swamp excursions, live music, and park sits. It was easy to strike up conversations with locals. We walked for miles and capped off sticky, sweaty treks with cocktail hours and an unctuous gulf coast oyster or fifteen. Our afternoons and evenings brought friends – some new, some so old and distant that it was as though they were new again.
Our mornings were to ourselves; alone together in this new place until the world rocked back onto its axis, and until our shared 10x10 Brooklyn storage unit called us back home. This interdependence was a new dynamic in our friendship. We put this into writing: sloppy writing, simple writing, exploratory writing. We went so far as to film a scene starring ourselves which was so terribly terrible that it will never see the light of day. Still, this collection of ideas served as the basis for what would become “The Albatross Cafe.” Here’s the ultrasound:
The final form is far, far removed from the scenes you read here…but to get to where we got, we had to start where we were.
Postscripts:
The Albatross Cafe will be making its eighth (!) film festival appearance on April 21, 2024 at the 43rd Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival in a shorts block on Human Connection.
Our short film also teases a full-length television pilot, ever-so-loosely based on our relationship. The pilot has taken at least 2 dozen different draft forms, from slapstick to philosophical, and we’re currently finishing its latest iteration.
As always, you can find our weekly playlist from our Sunday night radio show HERE. Tunes from this week’s Assisted Living touch on omens & luck (apropos of earthquakes and eclipses!) and tease the approaching Summer Jam season.
For the record, Murder Dinghy Guy is a real guy - not a murderer (as far as Amrita discovered) and actually a fantastic date. But that’s another story…