Rewriting and"She's Having A Baby"

Sometimes it's encouraging when someone you(mostly) respect as an artist has some of the same problems as you.That is probably why I was so psyched to watch John Hughes' comedy about marriage and infertility "She's Having A Baby" when it was on cable the other night.

Granted, I am always working on a smaller scale, but I've really struggled for years with finding an adult creative voice when my life...really lacks most of the signifiers of adulthood.(Not that the suburban Shermer image of a job that forces you to grow up by being your one, well-fed, straitjacket doesn't feel sort of antique anyway, given how many side jobs people I know have just to keep going...I'm not sure how many people were living like this when he wrote like that, honestly, but very few are now.)

Anyway, I had some early luck writing about snarky teens/twenties crip outsiders and what they saw on the periphery, and blah, blah, we're all the same down deep, two parts struggle to three parts wish-fulfillment but feeling like a persecuted artiste because I had to fight for the main character's right to...I don't know, say "shit!" when she jams her thumb or something.(Like I would really do, but the most common feedback I got from my crip-focused writers' group was always that I was "comfortable with the male perspective" because of the expletives.)

  I guess I could have frozen a character in amber and eventually...I don't know, given her a you-tube channel or an instagram to post her scars on, but somehow my heart isn't with that kind of lightness anymore. I would love to have an "It Gets Better" story for the yutes, but it hasn't, at least not enough that I can place a reassuring hand on someone's spiritual shoulder and tell them how great being different is supposed to be.Everything that I have accomplished, such as it is, has taken me SO LONG that I am probably only twenty-five in work years/

Not really sure what's wrong with the movie, even when I didn't pick it out in the video store because it was the  latest from "the Ferris Bueller guy" and that meant spending a long-ago bright autumn afternoon watching a movie with sperm-count jokes with my father..The cast is pretty good, with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as newlyweds, and a lot of "Hey, it's that guy/ gal!" Chicago actors that you would recognize from a lot of shows in the 80s and 90s.(weirdly, including actor Dennis Dugan who made the cast of "Hill Street Blues" call him Captain Freedom all day so he didn't break character--no word on whether he expected everyone to treat him like an ad exec for this one!) Maybe it's just that they tell us Our Heroes are So In Love but what we really watch is a lot of picking each other apart...maybe it just that it never decides if we are supposed to root for them fitting in their neighborhood or not.