Professional Writings

Interviews, Articles, etc.

Tori Amos: Geek Love (January 2008 isue of Geek Monthly magazine)

ENTERTAINMENT MATTERS

Interview with The L Word writer Cherien Dabis

Interview with The Riches creator Dmitry Lipkin

Interview with Emmy Award-winning actor Maurice Benard

Interview with Emmy Award-winning actress Natalia Livingston

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Trifle: Flash Fiction

The Loon

by David Michael Conner

“What’s the difference between a loon and a duck?”

“Loons are crazy?”

“Shh!”

That was my mother shushing us. She was the caller, my dad was the shooter. My brother and I were the excess weight.

Every time she did her “Awoo! Woo! Woo!” we laughed.

“Keep it down!”

It should have become routine and boring, but it never did. The parents, as we called them, were a couple of odd ducks. He wore a hat with ear flaps; she wore a neon orange life vest. I don’t know why either wore either: the reeds were hardly thick enough to threaten an invasion of ticks or other infestation, and the water was scarcely three feet deep.

“Awoo!”

Bang.

Plop.

Another dead duck. A flurry of feathers. We’d paddle over, scoop up the body, dump it in the rickety canoe, and paddle back to wait.

They always came back. Hopefully it was because they had vacant minds, and not because they just didn’t care.

“You know,” my brother said, “it used to be said that the devil was a drake.”

“A duck?” my mother asked. “That’s ridiculous. What kind of threat could a duck be?”

Ripples parted the stagnant pondwater as the loons’ invisible feet wiggled them across the glistering surface. Their silliness was hidden under the ripples; to me they seemed powerful, causing rifts in the clouds and reflected gray sky. It was an illusion.

“Jesus!” said Dad, “look at that one!” He whispered the curse, but it still reflected his excitement.

From the sky fell a heavy-looking bird, almost twice the size of any of the others. It splashed down and propelled itself forward, quickly slowing to a casual stroll.

“Awoo. Woo. Woo.” This time it was the birds.

“Woo. Woo-oo.”

The big beige bird puttered toward us, seeming to peer directly through the vertical horsetails that cut our view of the open water. My father had a perfect shot.

“Shoot,” my mother whispered.

“I wonder how old—”

“Shut up,” said my father, cutting off my brother mid-sentence. Though he was whispering, his words sliced through the air, and his threat was not lost on us.

Water sloshed against the worn wooden planks that made the small boat. We slid up and down with the tiny waves.

My father took aim.

Suddenly the loon looked up at the sky and let out a bellow like none of us had ever heard; I guessed my father’s bullets had always hit before such terror had time to set in on the birds.

Green water was thrown into the air around the loon as it flapped helplessly. My father was still peering down the sight of his rifle. My mother, my brother and I just watched curiously as the bird flailed.

“Are you going to shoot it?” I asked.

“Shush.”

The other birds had already fluttered away. The giant loon was still in place, flapping and screaming through its fluted throat. Its voice cracked, and finally it flew up and out of the water, pulling the front two feet of a water moccasin into the air, and finally leaving one of its legs behind as the snake splashed back into the water and disappeared instantly.

The bird flew up and around, unsteadily at first, but quickly gaining its balance in flight.

“My God,” said my mother. “The poor bird.”

My brother and I looked at each other. I looked at the three dead birds in the boat.

The loon was still circling above, whistling and crying. Some of its voice was lost in the wind.

I thought it was strange that there was no blood. The leg simply seemed to detach. It was cold. I felt the leg of one of the dead loons in the boat. Cold.

“Don’t touch them,” said my mother. “They’re dirty.”

“You sell them,” I said.

“We clean them first,” she snapped.

We watched the bird circle above. I think we were all waiting for it to either fall out of the sky, dead, or to land its dumb bird body back in the pond. It did neither.

The other loons came back about an hour later. My father shot two more before the sun went down. The big loon never stopped flying. We actually stayed a little while longer than usual waiting for the bird to leave, but it never did.

The family often discusses that afternoon; we took the bird’s presence as an omen, though nothing ever came of it. My mother’s last spoken words were “the loon.”

We all know that what happened was nothing any more exceptional than any act of nature, or any act of God. But it’s one of those things that we all remember with a shared intensity, and have carried with us since. It has now elevated to the status of myth within our family.

When my brother died last year, his last words were “the loon.” If I have any control in my last hours, mine will be the same.

The Event Coordinator

by David Michael Conner

The awards show was to begin taping behind the curtain at precisely 8:15. In the mean time minor celebrities, who were in attendance only because their publicists and handlers were assured ahead of time that their stars would be winning this evening, were forced to mingle in the holding area with seat fillers—OK because they were busy preening for possible camera time—and lots of Aspirings hoping to make connections: aspiring screenwriters had projects perfect for this starlet and that show host; aspiring actors and aspiring actresses worked in tandems to break up rising actors’ and actresses’ conversations, and make connections to further their careers; and aspiring directors were offending everyone pretty evenly throughout the room.

Something had gone wrong with the event coordination, and Tracy Godwin was doing everything she could to do her job.

Making her way through the room, Tracy’s bobbed hair and enhanced breasts bounced with youthful vitality. This, of course, helped her work the men in the room and earned the latently enraged respect of the women in the room, but more than anything it helped her fit in as she cleaved through the masses to solve everyone’s problems. But tonight she had her own, and it was beginning to show.

“Excuse me.”

Someone was tapping Tracy on her exposed shoulder. She put her yoga mantra on “play” in the background of her mind and turned around. “Yes?” she said with a smile.

“Are you the one in charge of the green room?”

Word had gotten out: Tracy was on the radar.

“Yes,” she said, almost too distracted to notice that the too-hip leather-clad publicist who was about to interrogate her was pushing 50.

“Where is it?”

“It’s…I’m working on it.”

“My talent is going to leave. People are harassing her.”

“I’ll be right back,” Tracy said, patting the aggressive publicist on the shoulder. Her talent was one of the young beauties from American Beauty, who had taken her acting career not very far in a substantial amount of time. Tracy had a feeling the scale pay for tonight’s presentation would keep the starlet in the room. Tracy had her own problems.

One of the problems was that she had to go to the bathroom.

Like the rest of Hollywood, its eponymous Palladium venue was all smoke and mirrors. True to the cliché, the hall’s façade was convincingly beautiful, but the bathroom (like the greenroom, had it been available) was a cinder-block-and-bare-bulb wasteland.

“Whore.”

Tracy perked up in her stall. She knew that voice. It was one of the evening’s legitimate celebrities, who had been a long-long shot to actually appear.

“Hey!”

The other one! Two actual movie stars came to this show? The event’s stock just went up, and so did the magnitude of Tracy’s oversight.

“Can you believe it? No greenroom?” one of the actresses chirped.

“Oh well.”

Tracy tried to peek through the crack between the stall door and its frame. She could see only the heel of a shoe. She thought about bending down and forward to see more, but that would be obvious.

“You’re not gonna bitch about it?”

“No, why? It’s not worth it. By the time they fix it, it’ll be over.”

“Yeah I guess.”

“And this way I’m not tempted by craft service.”

“Yeah, and you can hock up in the toilet here.”

Silence. Someone had misspoken, Tracy thought. Then she heard the bathroom door squeak and shut quietly. She tensed her muscles for two full minutes before feeling sure the two stars had left the room, then finished her business.

Damn. She had been hoping for a Sex and the City face-to-face encounter in the equalizing world of the ladies’ room.

Tracy was new to Hollywood; it would be years before she realized that storylines rarely play out in real life as they do onscreen. After opening the greenroom, Tracy resigned herself that her Big Break would not come that evening.

Eventually her star would rise. It was just a matter of right events happening at the right time, and better coordination.