When I was 15, no one could see me. No one who really mattered, that is, which – in my sophomoric myopia – revolved around a hottie senior boy named Artie. Artie was tall, handsome, smart and, on occasion, borrowed his father’s tweed sport coat that had suede elbow patches and made him look like quite a promising young captain of industry. In retrospect, he reminded me of John Davidson (which just goes to show what conservative, white bread taste I had in an era that fostered The Beatles, free love, draft-dodging, and Mary Quant cosmetics).
Our mothers both belonged to the neighborhood garden club, an organization that raised all kinds of money for beautification projects such as planting festive flowers on median strips but, in actuality, probably spent more of their time wearing festive hats and drinking martinis. From the very start, I liked Artie’s mom and was always enormously polite to her. Goodness knows that even at 15 I had read enough “Dear Abby” columns to recognize that it was important to be on good terms with one’s future mother in law.
Artie, of course, had no clue that he was part of my long-range plan for marital bliss, three lovely children, and a house in the burbs that would be close enough in distance to have Sunday dinner with my parents. While I was busy memorizing vital information like his birthday, his locker combination, his favorite color, and whether he preferred Pepsi or Coke, Artie was busy hanging out with the debate team, participating in chess tournaments, and trying to score with varsity cheerleaders. This latter pursuit I chose to ignore, believing instead that they were throwing themselves at him and he was gallantly holding out for his one true love – a besotted young brunette who always “just happened” to show up at his locker between classes, coyly pretending it was coincidence.
If nothing else, I got lots of exercise racing back and forth across the campus for these accidental encounters. That, and the plot of Movie Girl.
Movie Girl is the launch book of a new humor fiction series that’s targeted to teens and tweens but also taps the memories of virtually any female who can remember what it was like to be young, madly in love, and riddled with angst about being an old maid on the heels of high school graduation.
Turns out that there are not only quite a few of us who can relate to those days of being invisible but who can also remember every angstrom of detail about the hottie boys whose libidos and attention spans were elsewhere. Only a few weeks ago I was chatting about the book’s premise with a total stranger on an airplane. Her eyes got misty for a moment.
“Funny,” she remarked, “but I hadn’t thought about Tony for years until you started telling me about your young heroine.” Tony – like Artie – was the senior on whom she’d had a crush. Even more amazing was the fact that – at least 30 years later – she still knew his locker combination by heart. “Why do you suppose that’s so?” she asked, relating that she was happily married and had absolutely no regrets that she and Tony never got together.
Interestingly, I’ve surveyed a number of my male associates – guys who were handsome, athletic and popular in high school – and asked them if they remembered if there were any starry-eyed sophomore girls who used to follow them around. The answer was universal: “Uh – no, none that I can recall.”
Just goes to prove my point.
It also goes without saying that these same lads would probably smack themselves in the forehead with a 2 by 4 if they knew how stunning and successful some of their love-struck wannabe girlfriends turned out when they finally grew up. Que sera sera.
When I first began pitching Movie Girl to prospective publishers, the response was not what I expected. While the editors were quite effusive in their praise of my comedic writing style, none of them felt that Laurie Preston was plausible as a character. (Considering she’s my fictional alter-ego, that’s sort of like being told I’m one-dimensional.) Naturally, I asked if they had any recommendations on what they’d like to see changed about her personality.
Herein are their collective responses.
“We would like Laurie better if she were:
• Anorexic
• Bulimic
• Addicted to drugs or alcohol
• Pregnant
• Homeless
• Incarcerated
• Sexually confused
• Goth
• A vampire.”
Any of these, they maintained, would make her more relatable to today’s youth. “Yikes!” I thought. “Isn’t anybody normal anymore?”
Rather than bend to pressure, I opted to take the series to Outskirts Press and am committed to producing two new books in the series each year. Not only do I have the benefit of a very long memory about high school but two books annually will allow my characters to gracefully age in the equivalent of cartoon years.
The best reward has been the feedback of mother/daughter book clubs and readers of all ages who have commented that they’d love to be able to go hang out with Laurie and her family and eat some of the father’s fabulous cooking. (One of them even recommended that future books contain some of Peter Preston’s gourmet recipes because reading MOVIE GIRL made her hungry.)
The one secret I won’t divulge, however, is that the fabulous house where Laurie spends most of her time actually exists. The owners have joked that if I ever gave out the address, they would probably awaken to find strangers camped out on their front lawn with cameras and – like the owner of Mary Tyler Moore’s fictional television home in Minneapolis – they’d have to put a For Sale sign on it and move away to escape the publicity.