But wait, there's more!

No sooner had I posted on Monday about being suddenly flooded with new projects (to wit: William Blake’s Inn, possible new play to direct, and a Large Art Burn for Alchemy), than I discovered that I may be co-writing a new musical.

I can explain.

A former student — as in, from 40 years ago — posted on Facebook that he was in the mood to create the next great American musical and asked for ideas. (Since we’re in the gestational phase of the whole thing, and since I haven’t cleared this post with him, he will be anonymous for the time being.) He’s a rock musician/DJ/sound guy, so this is an actual possibility.

Go read “Simon’s Dad,” a short story by Maupassant, I suggested.

This was not without a touch of self-interest. Years ago, when I first read the story, I thought it would make a great musical.

Synopsis: Simon is a little boy in a French village, whose mother, “La Blanchotte,” made the mistake of falling for a soldier who promised marriage, fathered her son, then moved on. Although respectable in every other regard, she is shunned by the village. On his first day at school, Simon is taunted because he doesn’t have a dad. Distraught, he ends up down by the river, where he first considers drowning himself but then is distracted by a frog.

He is interrupted by Philip, the new blacksmith, who just happens to be tall, bearded, and possessed of curly black hair. Philip takes him home, thinking he might score with La Blanchotte, but her austere manner nixes that idea. Simon asks Philip if he’ll be his dad, and jokingly Philip agrees.

Things progress, and a few months later Simon’s chief tormentor at school challenges Simon’s assertion that Philip is his dad: If he were, then he would be married to Simon’s mom. Simon runs to the smithy, crying, and tells Philip this. The other blacksmiths opine that La Blanchotte is a fine woman, a worthy woman, and would make a good wife for an honest man. Besides, they add, there’s more than one woman in the village who sinned the same way La Blanchotte did; they just weren’t jilted like she was.

Philip goes to La Blanchotte’s cottage and proposes, thus becoming for real “Simon’s dad.”

See? Is this not the next Disney musical? Turn, turn, KICK turn, YES, IT WILL WORK!

My co-author soon returned to Facebook as excited as I thought he would be at the prospect. (It is a very moving story.)

I actually began a WASTE BOOK notebook years ago to sketch the thing out, opening up the scenario to provide more stage plotting (mean girl Yvette and her gossipy mother, etc.), and even scribbling some lyrics to a couple of the songs. [I see that I used the same structure that I’m using in the William Blake’s Inn notebook, with a table of contents/index up front, and then randomly noted ideas on numbered pages.] [Also, in writing this post and double-checking the original story, I find that my adaptation has stuck in my head more than the original.]

So who knows? If my former student is serious about this, we may actually get this one done.