Reel (Hollywood Renaissance #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

“Every day that ends with me still breathing has ended well.”

“Boy, we all gonna die. Question is, how did you live? Did you live or just wait for death to come? Not me. I ain’t waiting for nothing.”

rack my brain for a play where a character faints, and all I can come up with is Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and that’s such a bad example.

I believe in economy of words. Talking too much usually means saying things I didn’t want to or shouldn’t have.

Theater has the power to transform, to transport. For every person waiting for curtains to rise, this story is the vehicle to escape the mundane, the grind, the pressures life imposes on us.

She’s obviously well-trained and disciplined, but her spirit gallops like a horse given its head, lengthening the reins until it runs wild.

This business is feast or famine. I’m eating now, but I’ve been hungry before. Not again. I’m thirty. Too old to still be living gig to gig and buying into that starving artist thing. I need health insurance and regularly scheduled meals, thank you very much.

I need a man who doesn’t think that because he has a dick and I don’t that I should defer to him—shrink my dreams down to a more manageable size.

“Do you know what Spike Lee did when the studio tried to pull the money for Malcolm X because they wanted it shorter?” “No, what?” Law answers cautiously. “He went to Black leaders, entrepreneurs, creatives, athletes and asked for help. He secured the financing himself from the community who most wanted that story told.

“Winston Churchill said history is written by the victors, but I would amend that to say it’s often written by liars. History is fact. You can’t change what happened, but you can edit it. People lie and leave out the truth, bend it to suit their needs. I like to tell stories that excavate the facts and expose the truth.”

“I remember watching Halle Berry’s Dorothy Dandridge movie. That scene when Dorothy dips her toe in the pool at the hotel where she’s performing in Vegas.”

Well, we know shame don’t come in white.

She said, to survive, don’t use your gift for shit you hate. Work in a grocery store, pump gas, pick up trash to get by before you corrupt your art.”

I was prepared to settle for whatever life he thought was big enough for me.”

“I need to go. Warmest regards,” I tell her, tapping into our Schitt’s Creek vernacular.

My life is a turntable in constant motion, and I can’t remember the last time I slowed down this way.

You know what an aspect ratio is, I assume. The ratio of an image’s width to its height. Well, she used to look up at the sky and say aspect ratio infinity: immeasurable.”

Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow, at least you had today.”

“This body is a shell,” she says, her voice sober. “No matter how beautiful or what size or how healthy, every single body inevitably returns to dust. It is not your legacy. It is not what you leave behind.”

Every single one of us is in that race, and a race against time is one you’ll never win.

It’s not an existential question of immortality, of living forever, but a challenge of numbered days and what we do with what we have. It’s not a string of todays that become yesterdays and aspire to tomorrow, but living like there is no guarantee. Living with an urgency to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done. To no matter what, live with what you’ll leave behind in mind.