Let’s see what happens. I’m not telling God anything. Yet.
I write a bimonthly narrative based on the stories from my blog, Third Place Cafe Stories, for the Mexican newspaper Milenio – all the tales true, all in a micro format, all related in one way or another to a cafe somewhere in the WWW (that’s Wide Wide World, in case you’re wondering – no dot-com invoked or involved).
“Wanna make God laugh? Tell God your plans.”
A joke told to me not long ago by a friendly Mexico City Uber driver. Like most good jokes, it holds more than a grain of truth. I adore jokes.
I spent a couple of years after college in the wilds of early 90s Madrid, where women post-Franco donned leather miniskirts, we stayed out all night dancing, and life became one long Pedro Almodovar full-length feature. I learned Spanish, traveled back and forth to France, fell in love with both cultures.
What was I saying? Oh, right. Tell God your plans.
However. I moved to Mexico City at the tail end of 1996 to marry another former student from my class at Chicago, who happened to be living there. The marriage lasted about a year. Luckily, I was a working financial journalist at the time, and that lasted a good five years. Until the dot-com bubble, too, went popsy, and the job went poof.
Then I thought I had to get serious about life (my goal was academia, remember that steadfast plan?). I returned to Chicago and wound up with this intense job in a boutique investment firm editing stock-market research.
And no, I did not tell God my plans this time. I simply stopped making them.
After about 20 years ensconced in the world of central banks and their ways, I’m now a free bird focused on my writing. As a full-time essayist and recorder of small tales, I spend most of my time in Mexico City.
However. On yearly visits to Chicago, I’d sit down with an old college friend from the theater scene, who happens to be a big wig now at the Second City Theater. We’d hash out our reactions to the script. Until one day a couple years back, my friend said to me over Pad Thai in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, “Eureka! This should be a screenplay!”
I was born in rural South Georgia to an old-time Southern Baptist minister and an indefatigable steel-magnolia mother, better known simply as “Mama” – not a dance coach, but a force to be reckoned with, the choreographer of all steps to be taken in our lives.
I made my own bid for autonomy by fleeing the South for the neo-Gothic halls of the University of Chicago, where I got a B.A. in English Lit, reading poetry submissions for The Chicago Review along the way. I sincerely thought I’d become an academic focusing on T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and other rad modernists.
Ay, caramba. I ended up at Mexico’s central bank on communications detail – speeches, translation, speeches, translation. Okay, so there was more to it than that, but you get the picture.
I´ve kept my nose to the grindstone the past couple years to learn screenwriting and put the techniques to work in a screenplay called ¡Baila, Corazón! The script started out as a stage-play for a musical, which, in turn, was born from experiences dancing with an amateur competitive dance group at the Mexican central bank (yes, we had a dance group).
FUN FACTS ABOUT ME
I once shared an elevator with Geraldo Rivera. I had no idea who he was.
The first song I ever danced to was “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer.
My first acting role, in a Chicago student theater production, was nonspeaking. I practiced nonstop.
My motto is: “Prepared for everything! Except for what actually happens.”