DISTRACTION WARNING

July Blog 2025

Jule Selbo

I’ve been beating myself over the head lately because I’m so distracted with what’s going on in the world. Yeah, hard to ignore.  That chapters that I would “normally” write, rewrite and rewrite again and then hopefully polish are getting rewritten five more times than normal – because I’m ‘not in the zone’.

The zone I am in is DISTRACTION.

I think I spent a whole week last month watching ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL (the original series (1978-1980, BBC, based on James Herriot books). Morning. Afternoon. Night. Total binge.

Not my usual fare – feel good melodram-edy with little plot, way too likeable characters (can people be this kind and respectful?) and lots of rolling, remote English countryside. But I think I needed (knew I needed) to live where life was simpler, where people were kind, where they cared about each other – and for the cow and sheep in distress.

 

I even wrote a 10-minute play called DISTRACTION WARNING.  There’s a group called Crowbait that meets the first Sunday night of every month at the Footlights Theatre in Falmouth. (The group has been around Portland for years, in different locales, it was created by April Singley-Masters, Cullen T.M. McGough, and Michael Tooher. They conceived the idea late one night at a bar, lamenting the lack of local playwrights being produced.)

Who attends Crowbait regularly? Doctors, engineers, theatre lovers, students, actors, writers, musicians, techies, retirees from different professions, baristas, construction workers, well-heeled and low-heeled folks who pay the ten buck entry fee (to cover rental of space). Those who feel like doing some writing, show up with a 10-minute play (about 5 pages of mostly dialogue). There is a prompt given every month, some people write to that, others write about whatever else is on their mind.

The names of the playwrights get put into a bag or sorting “hat”. The names of those who want to be among the acting pool that night get put into another “hat”.  Each meeting night will feature 10 plays. If your play is pulled out of the hat, you dip your hand into the actor hat and randomly choose the cast.  Genders/age/the ‘right’ casting for a role makes no difference. At one meeting I had a fifty-year-old man playing a ten-year-old girl and two thirty-year-old guys playing teenage ballerinas.

Maybe some of you readers have participated (in Maine or other places, one of the co-founders moved to the UK so it’s there too) and know that it’s all ‘cold readings’. Meaning that the actors have had no chance to read the short play ahead of time – they don’t know their character or the beginning, middle or end of the play. The author gets two minutes to tell them if it’s a comedy or drama and “the point” of the play (if the author even knows it) and one or two salient tips. That’s it.

Sometimes the casting works. Sometimes it doesn’t.  That’s the beauty/looseness of it. Some of the writers are first-timers, some are doing silly send-ups, some are working on craft.

FUN RULES: If the play goes over the strict ten-minute limit, it’s BUZZED down by a guy with a duck whistle. If the play goes over ten minutes, it’s not eligible to be considered for any prizes (which might be a Snickers and a package of gum).

People come to see each other (great community), to laugh, to get a chance to act or have their words/ideas/stories presented. To be distracted.

The play I wrote for last Sunday’s Crowbait was about a novelist who couldn’t write the last chapter of his book. Fear. Worry. Self-doubt. Avoiding judgments he was sure to come. So, he took a job writing the Warning/Caution labels on drugs.

You know things like – “Opepoflux users are at increased risk of ketoacidosis, dehydration, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, nasal spew, eye twitching, flop sweat, confusion, anxiety, serious infections in the urinary tract and BoBo’s gangrene…” etc.  That kind of thing. He becomes the favorite of the Surgeon General. He totally distracts himself with writing pessimistic harbingers of possible doom. He’s become obsessed, he’s not paying attention to his young child or wife (who fell in love with a risk-taking, deep-thinking author and know who is he?). The family is falling apart –

Why did I write it? Where did the idea come from? I know it was a warning to me.  That I wrote the silly play to get my mind back on the work I really care about. Telling me to not be distracted  SO much.