And, indeed, it was lights-out for those cats at about 6:45 on Monday morning. Beth was having none of Callie’s hiding under the bed trick — went right in after her — and the carriers were soon stuffed and loaded into our barely-recognizable car, and we into our Isuzu Turbo huge-windowed cab, the accelerator mashed into its position against the floorboard and 60+ mph average began counting down the 370 miles separating us from the property we’d agreed to lease for the next twelve months. Arizona continued impressing us with multi-colored silhouetted mountainscapes, and Saguaro Cacti covering stretches of mountain…
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It was 4 in the morning when Maggie woke me up to let me know Callie couldn’t sleep. I got up and played with them a bit, peeking out the window to see that our possessions were still ours, then climbed back into bed to make the most of the warm bed where, unbeknownst to me, Beth was having a nightmare. She had also been woken up and had seen me looking out the window, but then, she fell back asleep. In her dream, I turned to her from the window and said, “Well, we might as well get going,”…
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At the free continental breakfast at the La Quinta (which in Spanish, according to a famous comedy routine, means Next to Denny’s), we met an older traveling salesman named Frank. As we spoke, he told me I need to get an agent in LA, and also that I’d do well to tie-into USC. People might not have much advice to offer if you move to many cities, but it seems almost everyone knows the recipe for success in LA. Frank seemed to have the handle on the basic ingredients, didn’t he? Bidding him adios, we loaded our cooler with more…
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I won’t go into detail on the hours we spent standing at a payphone, having our patience strained by the customer service crew at the other end of Budget’s 800 service number. For the most part, we kept driving and stopping to check to see if they’d found us a new car carrier. Even doped-up on their kitty valiums, Callie and Maggie came out of their holes to sit in Beth’s lap and keep her company during her miles with them. Finally, we phoned in and found that a trailer had been located in New Orleans. If you look at…
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It’s March 21, 2010, a Sunday, a little over 12 years after I emailed the following report to our friends and family members, the first of five installments documenting our move to California. Neither Beth nor I had ever been west of Texas before that time, but we were up for LA and fun new times with the dawn of 1998. So much has happened since then, for us and everyone we’ve met on this journey. Over the days ahead, I’ll be posting the other notes from this trek, followed by the photolog of our 2001 move to the Blue…
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Ready?
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You may know this already: I have been rediscovered. Some of the world’s united seaQuest fans contacted me in February of last year. Soon thereafter, an entry was made to the official Wikipedia seaQuest entry adding my original script to the log of actual episodes of the NBC/Universal television series which sadly ended its network primetime run in 1996. I did not work on the show as a writer, but I did serve the season three top brass, and took my shot with a spec script for season four. While it was very well received — seaQuest 2032 was not…
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You can now watch “Bumper Crop” in its entirety at darnellworks.com/bmovie With fond memories of the cast and crew:
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. February 22, 1991: Bumper Crop, Part 1 . June 29, 1991: Bumper Crop, Part 2 . June 29, 1991: Bumper Crop, Part 3 . December 5, 2008: Bumper Crop is now live In February of 1993, together with my friends Bill Waxler, Peter Eisner and Bob Storer, I spent a very interesting day assembling the picture and sound for “Bumper Crop” at Digital Multi-Media Post, Bob’s treasure-laden post-production facility in Orlando. There, in Mr. Storer’s hands, we saw the performance Harry Phipps had given us nearly two years before edited together to present the story I’d written, based on…
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The ‘Bumper Crop’ series has at least one more entry, but requires a bit more work on my part before I can post the rest of the story. In the meantime, I wanted to share something from a more recent work. After we moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains almost exactly seven years ago, I found my creative writing energies more or less depleted. Soon, being a father added a new dimension to my life, and the one creative project that stayed on my agenda was to write an epic poem for Amelia, detailing the first day of her life…